Real Project Database

OR-AS has a long history on doing academic research on Integrated Project Management and Control in collaboration with the Operations Research and Scheduling (OR&S) group of Ghent University. Most of the work done has been tested on artificial project data generated under a strict controlled design, since it is and remains the best way to fully test the power and relevance of new techniques and concepts. But before an algorithm or novel technique can be integrated in our software tools (ProTrack, PSG and P2 Engine), their relevance will always be validated on real empirical project data. And that is where the problem lies...

Despite excellent efforts in the academic literature to gather project data, little to no real empirical project data on scheduling, risk and control are available to download these data for research purposes. But this is now no longer true, since we have uploaded more than 50 real projects on our website, and written a paper about it.

Rather than just dumping our data on a website, we have validated the data collection and classification process and have written down out main findings in a paper that has been submitted to the International Journal of Project Management. In doing so, we assure that the both collection and classification of our empirical data have gone through a peer-reviewed process, which makes our database the first project set in the academic literature that includes scheduling, risk and control data. 

After some modifications and improvement made during the review process, the International Journal of Project Management has decided to publish our work under the title “Construction and evaluation framework for a real-life project database” authored by Jordy Batselier and Mario Vanhoucke.

^{Click on this picture to visit the publisher's website}

In this paper, you will find out that...

• we offer a general framework to people who are willing to share their project data with us,
• we collect and analyse project data and summarize their main characteristics using a novel methodology.

The empirical database is continuously under construction, and will be updated upon availability of new project data. The data can be downloaded by clicking on the link below.

^{Click on this picture to visit our project database}