Project Portfolio Selection Problems: A Review of Models, Uncertainty Approaches, Solution Techniques, and Case Studies

Abstract

Project portfolio selection has been the focus of many scholars in the last two decades. The number of studies on the strategic process has significantly increased over the past decade. Despite this increasing trend, previous studies have not been yet critically evaluated. This paper, therefore, aims to presents a comprehensive review of project portfolio selection and optimization studies focusing on the evaluation criteria, selection approach, solution approach, uncertainty modeling, and applications. This study reviews more than 140 papers on project portfolio selection research topic to identify the gaps and to present future trends. The findings show that not only the financial criteria but also social and environmental aspects of project portfolios have been focused by researchers in project portfolio selection in recent years. In addition, meta-heuristics and heuristics approach to finding the solution of mathematical models have been the critical research by scholars. Expert systems, artificial intelligence, and big data science have not been considered in project portfolio selection in the previous studies. In future, researchers can investigate the role of sustainability, resiliency, foreign investment, and exchange rates in project portfolio selection studies, and they can focus on artificial intelligence environments using big data and fuzzy stochastic optimization techniques.

Project portfolio planning under CO2 fleet emission restrictions in the automotive industry

“…The literature stream of project portfolio selection (PPS) refers explicitly to the selection of an optimal project portfolio that fulfills strategic and financial objectives in multiple periods, considering the cash flow that results from the project decisions. Reviews on PPS approaches are given in Kornfeld and Kara (2011) and Mohagheghi et al (2019). Most PPS approaches are principally based on the framework introduced by Archer and Ghasemzadeh (1999) and use different methods to identify beneficial project portfolios with a recent trend towards optimization models.…”

Project Portfolio Selection and Scheduling with Resource Allocation, Synergies, and Project Divisibility

“…Mathematical programming models can be solved with efficiency exactly or approximately by most of the modern commercial solvers available with the right computation resources. Today, multiobjective optimization is not a limitation for mathematical programming, so solutions based on mathematical programming are at least good candidates for solving complex problems like the integrated problem of portfolio selection and scheduling; therefore, as stated by Mohagheghi et al [2], the literature is still weak in proposing exact solution methods to this integrated problem.…”

“…e main objective of PPSS is to select a subset of project proposals and implement an execution plan by assigning required resources to selected projects obeying certain precedence and availability constraints [2].…”

“…(1) Allow splitting projects in the task and consider such tasks for selection as well as for scheduling. (2) In the proposed model, when a project is selected to be supported, several different types of resources are allocated to it and to its tasks. e assigned amount is stated between a minimum amount and the requested quantity, the minimum being the corresponding minimum quantity to guarantee the success of project objectives.…”

A clustering‐based review on project portfolio optimization methods

“…For this reason, metaheuristics are becoming increasingly popular for solving these project portfolio problems (Beasley, 2013). We can find in the literature some surveys on project portfolio optimization (Mohagheghi et al., 2019), and on the more general portfolio optimization problem (Detemple, 2014; Huang, 2017; Soler‐Dominguez et al., 2017; Masmoudi and Abdelaziz, 2018; Zhang et al., 2018). However, to the best of our knowledge, no other study has used clustering tools to analyze the publications in the field of project portfolio optimization.…”