Re: [Planner Dev] Uncertainty management / MonteCarlo simulation

[Mark Durrenberger <m durrenberger comcast net>]

Comments in Line...

> I think that you can just get the result of the simulation and take the
> frequency with a given precision.

Not sure what you mean by this.

>   In the Gantt view what you are doing
> actually is scheduling, so you should be able to chose the start and
> finishing date to a given percentage of the probability to make it.


> Of
> course when the task is always away of the critical path you can choose
> any number.
Actually one of the values of Monte Carlo is to see what the "most 
probable" critical path is and for many projects there are multiple 
critical or near critical paths.  In these situations you'll have what is 
called a "Merge effect" - think of it this way, I'm a parent of Triplets 
(honest, age 11) On Saturday morning I say to the kids, hey, lets go 
fishing. When do I actually back out of the garage? When the last kid gets 
into the car not when the average kid gets into the car, not when the kid 
plus one standard deviation gets into the car... Well projects often have 
the same situation multiple critical or near critical paths...

So the only way to get a proper duration calculation is through a monte 
carlo simulation...

> I used python to do my Monte Carlo simulation program because it already
> has a package for a lot of probability distributions (scipy).

great I assume we can use these in Planner.


> I really think that it is not hard to do the simulation, but get harder
> to integrate it visually with all the other things.  Once you have your
> uncertain durations, you should calculate your uncertain costs ;-)

I have lots of ideas on the visual aspect, even with limited access to MS 
Project's user interface (you can't put graphics on the gantt chart for 
example) I've been able to show the user duration means and standard 
deviations etc.

Mark