Project Management and Evaluation

Recommended Prerequisites

Civil Engineering, Environment and Sustainability; Engineering Systems; Transports and Sustainable Mobility.

Teaching Methods

Lectures with the help of audiovisual media where concepts, principles and theories are presented in detail. Practical exercises that meet all the needs of students are solved, with guidelines provided. Assessment of students involves the undertaking of individual assignments and final exam, or final exam.

Learning Outcomes

To acquire expertise in the principles for the evaluation and management of large-scale civil engineering projects in an environment where globalization, technology, sustainability concerns and complexity, require that engineers are mainly integrators of systems; to develop high-level skills needed in project management and evaluation, that includes engineering financial, economics, environmental evaluation, cost-benefit analysis, life-cycle analysis and multicriteria analysis.

Competencies:

• to acquire awareness of the need to consider sustainability concerns in all civil engineering projects;

• to acquire sensitivity for the importance of the project life-cycle;

• to know how to use adequate project evaluation methods and software;

• to know how to develop some sensitivity analysis;

• to understand the conflicts that usually exist among multiple criteria decision-making and the need for searching compromise solutions.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

1. Introduction - challenges of large civil engineering projects and systematic approaches; Project team' structure and functions; Methodologies for evaluating taking into consideration impacts, the efficient allocation of resources over life cycle, and projects typical characteristics: large-scale, long-lived, involving economic, financial, social, and environmental dimensions; impacts over the life cycle of projects.

2. Financial evaluation: engineering economics; methods for quantification of profitability.

3. Cost-Benefit analysis: microeconomic foundations, methodologies for assessing monetary values for costs and benefits, including intangible ones and external effects; shadow prices.

4. Multicriteria analysis of engineering projects: criteria elicitation; data normalization; filtering techniques; weighted sum, TOPSIS, ELECTRE, AHP methods; sensitivity and trade-offs analysis.

5. Risk and uncertainty assessment.

6. Examples: analysis of major civil engineering projects.

Head Lecturer(s)

João Manuel Coutinho Rodrigues

Assessment Methods

Final assessment
Exam: 100.0%

Final assessment
Resolution Problems: 40.0%
Exam: 60.0%

Bibliography

[1] Boardman, A., D.Greenberg, A.Vining, D.Weimer - Cost-benefit analysis: concepts and practice. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

[2] Coutinho-Rodrigues, J. - Gestão de Empreendimentos - A Componente de Gestão da Engenharia, 2ª ed., Ediliber, 2012.

[3] European Commission - Guide to Cost-Benefit Analysis of Investment Projects. Economic appraisal tool for Cohesion Policy 2014-2020. Directorate-General for Regional and Urban policy, Brussels, 2014.

[4] Farr, J.; I.Faber - Engineering economics of life cycle cost analysis. CRC Press, 2018.

[5] Martland  C. - Toward More Sustainable Infrastrusture: Project Evaluation for Planners and Engineers, 2012.

[6] Meredith, J.; S.Manter - Project Management: A Managerial Approach, Wiley, 8th ed., 2011.

[7] Project Management Institute - A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (Pmbok Guide) PMI, 2017.

[8] Revelle, C.; E.Whitlatch; J.Wright. - Civil and Environmental Systems Engineering, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 2004.