Organizing Interrelated Activities in Complex Product Development

An important decision problem faced by design managers is identifying an appropriate sequence of many interrelated activities. This study presents an effective tool for determining the activity sequence with minimum total feedback length in a design structure matrix. This problem can be modeled as the linear ordering problem with quadratic objective function and is extremely difficult to solve even for small problem instances. We first transform this problem into two equivalent linear integer programming problems, which can be solved exactly when the number of interrelated activities is not large. To provide good solutions for large problem instances, we further develop an exchange-based heuristic. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed methodology is validated through case study, computer experiments, and benchmark analysis.