Declarative Modelling Approach for New Product Development

Abstract

Abstract The paper is concerned with using constraint programming for simulating an alternative project completion of new product development (NPD). All possible variants of project completion are sought within the company’s resources and requirements for an NPD project. A company and its projects can be considered in terms of variables and constraints that constitute the systems approach for a project prototyping problem. This problem is described in the form of a constraint satisfaction problem and implemented with the use of constraint programming techniques. The paper also presents a method for estimating the NPD cost and unit production cost, and simulating variants that ensure the desirable level of costs, including the impact of granularity on the number of solutions. An example shows the applicability of the proposed approach in the context of NPD projects.