In today's competitive environment, it is necessary to deliver products on time and within budget. Unfortunately, design projects have been plagued by severe cost and schedule overruns. This problem persists in spite of the significant advances that have been made in design technology over the last two decades. In most of the cases, the problem of overruns is due to poor estimation. The search for a solution has become even more pressing in the present era of shrinking product cycle times. / Driven primarily by this need, this thesis presents new effort estimation models. Unlike existing estimation techniques that are based on work breakdown structures with respect to process or product, the proposed models are based on a new metric for estimating product complexity, which is based on product functional decomposition. The validity of the metric as a good predictor of design effort was tested using data obtained from an experiment involving simple design tasks, and empirically using historical data collected for 32 projects from 3 companies. / The performance of the new effort estimation models was tested in terms of a number of objective criteria. The results indicated that the average estimation error of the models ranged from 12% to 15%. The improvement in estimation accuracy accomplished by the models ranged from 52% to 64% compared to estimates originally made by the companies which had errors from 27% to 41%. / Moreover, models for estimating cost and duration, as well as updating the estimates during project execution, were derived. The applications of the derived models are described through demonstrative examples. Thus, a complete methodology is given for the estimation of project effort and duration.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.35569 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Bashir, Hamdi A. |
| Contributors | Thomson, Vince (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Mechanical Engineering.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001763048, proquestno: NQ64508, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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