Abstract

In managing a product development project, one of the primary objectives is to minimize the gap between the resultant product quality and its predetermined target under the given due date constraint. Achieving this objective is not an easy task mainly because the fact that, due to uncertainties in the duration and the output of each activity, the project's lead-time and the product quality remain uncertain until the project is completed. In order to facilitate this task, the authors propose a new approach, called schedule FMEA. It classifies the possible outcome of each activity into several categories of results; success and one or some failure mode(s), and prepares a corrective action for each failure mode. If a failure mode is observed in running the project, the predetermined corrective action will be taken. In this article, only the truncation of each activity is considered as the optional corrective actions. In this case, the result of each activity is defined as success when it is completed with a shorter duration than the preset limit, otherwise it is regarded as failure and the corrective action will be taken, that is, the activity will be truncated. The problem of setting a limit to the duration of each activity is formulated as a dynamic decision making process, and a heuristic algorithm is developed to this problem. Some numerical examples are given to illustrate the power of the proposed approach.

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