Multi-criteria approach to project portfolio selection considering structural hardness and correlations between projects

Project portfolio selection is one of the important subjects for decision-makers’ in project-based organizations. As financing projects with low benefit is just wasting the valuable resources, the best assignment of resources to the most appropriate projects is a necessary target for all project-based organizations. However, existing project selection models pay not much attention the structure and special features of projects as a selection criterion, while their hardness may prolong the project duration and even result in stopping the project. Furthermore, the models don’t consider the correlations between projects which may affect the results. In this paper, a model is proposed to measure the structural hardness of projects. Then, a project portfolio selection model is proposed considering hardness and correlations between projects. A case study is presented to test the performance of the model in real world problems. At the end, some large-sized numerical example has been solved. The results show the capability of the model to solve large-sized problems in a suitable time. The important roles of structural hardness in project selection are discussed and sensitivity analysis has been done.