Comparison between Critical Path Method (CPM) and Last Planners System (LPS) for Planning and Scheduling METRO Rail Project of Ahmedabad

The purpose of this paper is to compare Critical Path Method (CPM) and Last Planner System (LPS) with respect to Planning and Scheduling of METRO Rail Project, Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Critical Path Method emphasises on updating the network for tracking the progress as well as to identify the delays. Last Planner System works on the weekly schedules prepared from the Master Plan and Look-ahead schedules to avoid the delays. One of the stretch from North-South Corridor was selected for the study from Vijaynagar to Usmanpura. The data such as activities, duration of activities, sequence and inter-relation of activities etc. were collected to prepare the network as well as weekly schedules. The network was updated and original network was compared with the updated one and the delays were spotted for the stretch selected. Weekly plans were also prepared for the selected stretch from the look-ahead schedule and Master Plan. PPC (Percent Plan Complete) were calculated to track the progress as per planned schedule. The data were collected by conducting interviews of various personnel and visual observations. Both the approaches (CPM and LPS) have been applied on the selected stretch by action research process. The delays were calculated and studied for both the methods and it was observed that Last Planner System is more appropriate to use for big infrastructure projects like this to avoid time-overrun and consecutive cost over-run. Resources can be well utilized with the Last Planner System, too. The type of this paper is a Case Study.