A prediction model for construction project time contingency

Construction projects often suffer from high level of uncertainty in many fronts: time, cost, quality, safety, etc. Most of the conducted research focuses on estimating cost contingency. Even though construction project scheduling has received extensive attention of researchers, time contingency was not treated well in the literature. In order to meet the deadline of a project, an accurate scheduling should be sought. Due to the nature of construction projects, scheduling should be flexible enough to accommodate changes without negatively affecting the overall duration of the project. As such, the objectives of the research presented in this paper are to assess the factors that affect scheduling contingency and to develop a simple model that can be used in estimating the expected time contingency of a construction project. A survey was conducted on sixteen construction companies in Montréal, Québec, Canada. The data obtained from the survey was then processed using Analytic Hierarchy Processes (AHP) to develop a time contingency model. Results show that the predicted time contingency matches with 87% the estimated contingency for real projects. The developed time contingency model showed robust results.