Modelling project failure and its mitigation in a time-stamped network of interrelated tasks

TL;DR

This paper models cascading failures in time-stamped task networks to evaluate mitigation strategies, highlighting the importance of task timing adjustments over static network structure for preventing large-scale project failures.

Contribution

It introduces a temporal network model for project tasks and evaluates mitigation strategies, emphasizing the role of task timing in failure prevention.

Findings

Temporal properties are more influential than structural properties in failure mitigation.

Adjusting task timings can effectively contain cascading failures.

Strategies based on increased time buffers show promising results.

Abstract

Resolving major societal challenges, such as stagnated economic growth or wasted resources, heavily relies on successful project delivery. However, projects are notoriously hard to deliver successfully, partly due to their interconnected nature which makes them prone to cascading failures. We deploy a model of cascading failure to temporal network data obtained from an engineering project, where tasks constituting the entire project and inter-dependencies between tasks correspond to time-stamped nodes and edges, respectively. We numerically evaluate the performance of six strategies to mitigate cascading failures. It is assumed that increased time between a pair of inter-connected tasks acts as a buffer, preventing a failure to propagate from one task to another. We show that, in a majority of cases that we explored, temporal properties of the activities (i.e., start and end date of each task in the project) are more relevant than their structural properties (i.e., out-degree and the size of the out-component of the task) to preventing large-scale cascading failures. Our results suggest potential importance of changing timings of tasks, apart from the static structure of the same network of tasks, for containing project failure.