Assessing Project Resilience Through Reference Class Forecasting and Radial Basis Function Neural Network

A project needs to be able to anticipate potential threats, respond effectively to adverse events, and adapt to environmental changes. This overall capability is known as project resilience. In order to make efficient project decisions when the project is subjected to disruption, such as adjusting the project budget, reformulating the work plan, and rationalizing the allocation of resources, it is necessary to quantitatively understand the level of project resilience. Therefore, this paper develops a novel approach for forecasting project performance, illustrating the changes in performance levels during the disruption and recovery phases of a project and thus quantitatively assessing project resilience. While there are several methods for assessing project resilience in existing research, the majority of assessment approaches originate from within projects and are highly subjective, which makes it difficult to objectively reflect the level of project resilience. Moreover, the availability of project samples is limited, which makes it difficult to forecast the level of project performance. In view of the fact that the Reference Class Forecasting (RCF) technique avoids subjectivity and the Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network is known to be better at forecasting small sample datasets, this paper therefore combines the RCF technique and the RBF neural network to construct a model that forecasts the project performance of the current project after experiencing a disruption, further assessing the level of the project resilience. Specifically, this paper first presents a conceptual model of project resilience assessment; subsequently, an RBF neural network model that takes into account project budget, duration, risk level of disruption, and performance before disruption based on the RCF technique is developed to forecast project performance after experiencing disruption; and finally, the level of project resilience is assessed through calculating the ratio of recovery to loss of project performance. The model is trained and validated using 64 completed construction projects with disruptions as the datasets. The results show that the average relative errors between the forecast results of schedule performance index (SPI) and the real values are less than 5%, and the R2 of the training set and the testing set is 0.991 and 0.964, respectively, and the discrepancy between the forecasted and real values of project resilience is less than 10%. These illustrate that the model performs well and is feasible for quantifying the level of project resilience, clarifying its impact on project disruption and recovery situations, and facilitating the decision-makers of the project to make reasonable decisions.