Computing Completion Time and Optimal Scheduling of Design Activities in Concurrent Product Development Process

This paper proposes a time-computing model and a scheduling method for shortening the completion time of product development under the given rework cost budget. As overlapping and iteration exist between or among design activities in concurrent product development, predictability and efficiency of the process deserve attention. By using the corresponding design structure matrix, the characteristics of information flow are obtained and applied to analysis of the dynamic behavior of the product development process. A time-computing model is set up to estimate the rework cost and completion time of each of the activities, between which both iteration and overlapping are observed. Through sequential quadratic programming, an optimization algorithm is developed for minimizing the development completion time under the constraint of the given rework cost budget. Our application results acquired from our experiments have verified the feasibility and validity of the approach.