Forecasting enterprise resource planning software effort using evolutionary support vector machine inference model

Despite significant advances in procedures that facilitate project management, the continued reliance of software managers on guesswork and subjective judgment causes frequent project time overruns. This study uses an Evolutionary Support Vector Machine Inference Model (ESIM) for efficiently and accurately estimating the person-hour of ERP system development projects. The proposed ESIM is a hybrid intelligence model integrating a support vector machine (SVM) with a fast messy genetic algorithm (fmGA). The SVM mainly provides learning and curve fitting while the fmGA minimizes errors. The analytical results in this study confirm that, compared to artificial neural networks and SVM, the proposed ESIM provides preliminary prediction at early phase of ERP software development effort for the manufacturing firms with superior accuracy, shorter training time and less overfitting. Future research can develop user-friendly expert systems with window or browser interfaces that can be used by planning personnel to flexibly input related variables and to estimate development effort and corresponding project time/cost. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.