Abstract—To gain competitive leverage, firms that design and develop complex products seek to increase the efficiency and predictability of their development processes. Process improvement is facilitated by the development and use of models that account for and illuminate important characteristics of the process. Iteration is a fundamental but often unaddressed feature of product development (PD) processes. Its impact is mediated by the architecture of a process, i.e., its constituent activities and their interactions. This paper integrates several important characteristics of PD processes into a single model, highlighting the effects of varying process architecture. The PD process is modeled as a network of activities that exchange deliverables. Each activity has an uncertain duration and cost, an improvement curve, and risks of rework based on changes in its inputs. A work policy governs the timing of activity execution and deliverable exchange (and thus the amount of activity concurrency). The model is analyzed via simulation, which outputs sample cost and schedule outcome distributions. Varying the process architecture input varies the output distributions. Each distribution is used with a target and an impact function to determine a risk factor. Alternative process architectures are compared, revealing opportunities to trade cost and schedule risk. Example results and applications are shown for an industrial process, the preliminary design of an uninhabited combat aerial vehicle. The model yields and reinforces several managerial insights, including: how rework cascades through a PD process, trading off cost and schedule risk, interface criticality, and occasions for iterative overlapping. Index Terms—Activity network, budgeting, cycle time, design iteration, design structure matrix, engineering design management, process architecture, process modeling, process structure, product development, rework, risk management.

Given the crucial role of process modeling in product development (PD) project management research and practice, and the variety of models proposed in the literature, a survey of the PD process modeling literature is timely and valuable. In this work, we focus on the activity network-based process models that support PD project management and present a comprehensive survey of the literature published in the last decade. To organize our survey, we use a framework based on the

Abstract: A plan of action is given for a newly funded research project on organizational evolution. In this study, our goals are to apply an evolutionary framework to organizational learning. The process includes a collaborative effort with partner companies to identify the working mechanisms behind the evolution of policies or decision rules. We also use computer simulations as a tool to examine our findings. Introduction: This document describes a plan of action for a three-phase research project

Errors and changes, particularly in concurrent design and construction, require a careful approach to their management, since they can generate unanticipated impacts on construction performance, which is often related to softer aspects of management (e.g., fatigue). Focusing on this issue, this paper explores the use of system dynamics in identifying multiple feedback processes and softer aspects of managing errors and changes. Applying the developed model into the design-build highway project in Massachusetts, this paper concludes that the system dynamics approach can be an effective tool in the understanding of complex and dynamic construction processes and in supporting the decision making process of making appropriate

Regular Paper This paper provides a foundation for modeling the set of activities and their relationships by which systems are engineered, or, more broadly, by which products and services are developed. It provides background, motivations, and formal definitions for process modeling in this specialized environment. We treat the process itself as a kind of system that can be engineered. However, while product systems must be created, the process systems for developing complex products must, to a greater extent, be discovered and induced. Then, they tend to be reused, either formally as standard processes, or informally by the workforce. We distinguish and clarify several important concepts in modeling processes, including: product development versus repetitive business processes, descriptive versus prescriptive processes, activities as actions versus deliverables as interactions, standard versus deployed processes, centralized versus decentralized process modeling, “as is ” versus “to be ” process modeling, and multiple phases in product development. We also present a basically simple yet highly extendable and generalized framework for modeling product development processes. The framework enables building a single model to support a variety of purposes, including project planning (scheduling, budgeting, resource loading, and risk management) and control, and it provides the scaffolding for knowledge management and organizational

Product development includes many different types of decision-making by engineers and managers. Design decisions determine the product form and specify the manufacturing processes to be used. Development decisions control the progress of product development projects by specifying which activities should happen, their sequence, and who should perform them. This paper introduces the concept of a decision production system to describe a product development organization as a system of decision-makers who use and create information to develop a product. This perspective does not advocate any particular type of product development process. Instead, it looks at the organization in which the product development process exists and considers the decision-makers as a manufacturing system that can be viewed separately from the organization structure.

This paper investigates different methods of problem solving strategy – dubbed in this paper as “Search Strategy ” – in the process of Product Innovation. It objects the basic assumption of current models of Product Innovation Process (PIP) proposed by previous literature which considers unrealistically that the product innovation’s actors – the product innovators – are hyper-rationale, homogenous and non choice-restricted actors. In order to take into account the more realistic view of the product innovators – bounded rationale, heterogeneous and choice-restricted actors –, this paper proposes an alternative model of Product Innovation Process based on the Science of Cognitive Psychology. According to this framework, the options of Search Strategy available to each product innovator depend on certain cognitive abilities which the product innovator is able or not to use. To examine the validity of this theoretical framework, this paper investigates the phenomenon of the evolution of discovery methods in the Agrochemical lead discovery process. Data for this investigation is gathered through chronological product innovation survey from agrochemical patents data base and through publications index data base. Result from this

This material is based upon work funded and supported by United States Department of Defense under Contract No.