Program Drafts for Regional Economic Development: Assessing Their Priority and Modeling the Sequence of Their Implementation

The most important complex tasks solved by economic development programs are the economic development of regions, the restoration and improvement of industrial enterprises, transport accessibility, and infrastructure. Accurate evaluation of program project priorities and logical arrangement of their execution promotes the region’s economic harmony. The research aims to build an integrated mechanism for assessing the priority of projects and modeling their implementation schedule considering the priority. The study’s scientific novelty stems from its calculation mechanism that uses both expert opinions (verbal scale) and fuzzy estimates to decide regional development project priorities. Also, the authors offer a criterion of lost profits in case of delay in project implementation for assessing the resulting schedule; an economic and mathematical model; and an algorithm based on the selection of projects under their priority. The implementation schedule is based on minimizing total lost profits. The study’s key results include the following original scientific and practical developments: a model for converting verbal expert opinions into quantitative assessments of project priority; the applying mechanism for the obtained draft priority assessments to construct a lost-profit criterion for project schedule modeling; step-by-step algorithms for solving the assigned problems, enabling the software development. The authors concluded that the proposed procedure is universal, and they recommend it for economic boosting program development at the federal subject level and at the district and municipal ones.