A Matlab-Based Educational Tool for Quantitative Risk Analysis

Risk Management is a core discipline within Project Management. The successful achievement of project objectives depends enormously on the proper implementation of project risk management, which includes the identification, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, planning and implementation of risk response and control. In this article, we focus on quantitative risk analysis. To assist project management students in dealing with project risks, we have developed an application in Matlab (R) (MCSimulRisk) that allows students to perform Monte Carlo Simulation applied to any project type simply and intuitively. Consequently, a valuable amount of time that would otherwise be wasted in project configuration can be devoted to interpreting the results. In addition, the presented tool allows modeling any type of project uncertainty and is not restricted to the aleatory uncertainty associated with the duration of the activities, which is the only type of uncertainty considered by other analysis tools available to date.