An approach for testing the feasibility of decomposing interdependent design tasks for concurrent engineering

Concurrent engineering process is characterized by executing a large number of interdependent project tasks. One effective way of managing such tasks is to decompose them into groups. However, not all tasks are decomposable. Without the need to apply a decomposition method, this paper describes a simple quantitative approach to test whether an underlying pattern of relationships exists between interdependent design tasks, such that they may be rearranged into groups. In addition, a grouping efficiency index for predicting the goodness of the best possible obtainable decomposition is introduced. The proposed approach and the grouping index were applied to simple hypothetical projects and a sample project adapted from the literature. Both the approach and the grouping index are proved to be powerful yet very easy to use.