A New Task Assignment Approach in Concurrent Engineering

Good task assignment and properly human resource scheduling in concurrent engineering (CE) can make the design process run smoothly and reduce the time-to-market greatly in the development of complex products. Based on some basic characteristics of task assignment oriented to CE, a new approach of task assignment is proposed. Firstly, an efficient task decomposition method is proposed based on the principle of task decomposition, in which a well-designed structure matrix to define the task decomposition process is given. Secondly, by taking those dynamic and fuzzy factors, and those non-quantification factors about subtasks and team members into consideration, a balanced matrix T-R-E among subtasks and team members is established. Then, a mathematic model for the assignment from tasks to teams, as well as from sub-tasks to team members is given, based on the principle of equilibrium-moderation. And an algorithm based on a method of branch and bound is employed to solve the mathematic model. Finally, with a detailed example, the proposed approach in this paper is proved to be proper and efficient for scheduling concurrent tasks in concurrent engineering