Abstract: It is well accepted that buffer management holds great significance to critical chain project management. As one of the core aspects of buffer management, buffer monitoring plays an important role in ensuringthe on-time delivery and providing the project with sufficient protection.The current buffer monitoring methods do not adequately account for the risk characteristics of the project phase and the dynamic association between activities.To solve this defect, a real-time rolling monitoring and control method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method takes into account the uncertainty of the project as well as the relationship between the various activities, and allocates project buffer based on the risk exposure of activities.The calculation of risk exposure index based on uncertainty and the initial buffer allocation on this basis are studied. Then the residual buffer is reallocated according to thedynamicrisk weighting factor of activities based on the rolling distribution monitoring model, and two monitoring thresholds are set andadjusted dynamically according to actual buffer consumption during project execution. Finally, the Monte Carlo simulation experiment is carried out to compare the proposed method with the current methods.The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can effectively reduce wrong warnings and the extra cost and time caused by the wrong warnings, signifying that it can greatly improve the on-time completion of the project.

Key words: critical chain project management, buffer management, real-time rolling, dynamic monitoring, uncertainties