A review of methods, techniques and tools for project planning and control

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief review of methods and techniques developed for the most commonly studied decision-making problems in project planning and control over the last decade. These problems involve project representation, project scheduling, resource allocation, risk analysis, time and cost performance evaluation, time, cost, and cash flow forecasting, optimal timing of control points, and corrective action decision-making. We also review recent tools developed for project planning and control. The emphasis is on recent contributions, but several older yet important works are also cited. Our analysis shows an increasing attention to the stochastic nature of projects in planning and control decision and processes. Recent attention has also been put at improvements in existing project control techniques as well as developing new methods to automate data collection, process, and generate more integrated project plan. More importantly, our review highlights an important shift in the project planning and control research field, which has been largely dominated by the project scheduling literature in the past, as short term and reactive decision-making bring new challenges and opportunities to project organisations and researchers.