A Discrete Differential Evolution Algorithm for Product Development Scheduling

Abstract

The scheduling of the design activities in product development process is a crucial step in early stages in order to achieve the project in time and cost-effective manner. In complex product development process, many dependency relationships or feedback loop could exist between design activities with multiple technical domains. Sequencing the design activities is a decision making process in order to reduce these feedback loops, and therefore, reduce amount of required information flows between activities. In recent years, methods for sequencing the design activities in design process have been proposed in order to reduce lead-time development and cost. The purpose of this research work is to present a methodology for design process sequencing in product development project by using Design Structure Matrix (DSM) for visualization a complex process and Discrete Differential Evolution (DDE) for sequencing the design tasks. The tests performed in this article have shown that this approach provides very competitive results in term of the quality of obtained solutions when compared to Genetic algorithms (GA). In additional it is a simple, effective and easy to use since the amount of control parameters to set is reduced.