A unique intelligent approach for forecasting project completion time in oil refineries

•A hybrid approach for forecasting project completion in oil refineries.•It can handle complex and uncertain safety factors.•It is based on ANN, fuzzy mathematical programming and regression.•Neural network provides lowest relative error in most cases.•This is the first study that presents a hybrid approach in oil refineries.

This study presents a hybrid approach for accurate forecasting of project completion time with noisy and uncertain safety factors in oil refineries. The hybrid approach is based on artificial neural network (ANN), fuzzy mathematical programming (FMP) and conventional regression. Three indictors, namely, number of occupational injuries, number of employees and ratio of maximum useful hours over useful hour per month are considered as inputs. Also, project completion time is considered as the main output. To achieve the objective of this study, five sets of data with respect to oil refinery construction projects in various cities of Iran are collected and analyzed through statistical methods. It is shown that for the actual case of this study, ANN presents lowest mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Also, analysis of variance (ANOVA) is used to verify and validate the results of this study. This is the first study that presents a hybrid approach for accurate estimation and forecasting of project completion time with complex, noisy and uncertain occupational factors.