A heuristic buffer sizing algorithm for implementing a renewable energy project

Abstract The swiftly growing wind farm projects together with the increasing uncertainty of these types of construction projects makes it more probable that projects will face delay. This research aims to introduce a heuristic algorithm to determine the sizes of project buffer and feeding buffers as well as dynamically control buffer consumption, named as Fuzzy Overlapping Buffer Management Algorithm (FOBMA). In this paper, the pentagonal fuzzy numbers were used to determine the appropriate amount of project activity resources. Also, an overlapping method was applied to obtain more realist activity durations. The FOBMA algorithm was compared to other algorithms using the data of 15 real-world wind farm projects as well as 15 randomly generated numerical examples. Moreover, the sensitivity analysis was conducted to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The findings demonstrate that the proposed FOBMA algorithm outperforms the other algorithms and yielded more realistic and shorter project duration.