Organizing the Product Development Processes: Four Perspectives

Abstract

As stated by Zeng (Zeng, 2011), design comes from an environment, serves the environment, and changes the environment. Understanding the environment of a product is recognized by the research community to have a crucial impact on quality and success of products, services and complex systems. In this context, the aim of the Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science (JIDPS) is to publish research findings covering transdisciplinary notions of design and process. The focus of the journal is aligned with three fundamental objectives which are; a) the understanding of design and process crossing boundaries of natural, human, and built environments, b) the principles, methods, and tools, and c) the applications of design and process science to engineering and social problems. The present transaction is covering well those three lines of research by providing researches associated with: 1The optimization of the scheduling and organization of the system development process, 2The integration of product service system tools into the product development process, 3The analysis of the consistency in the architecture of large scale systems, 4The risk management in new product and service process, The present issue is trying to understand and act on the environment in large of systems or services by understanding the processes associated with the design of those systems and services. The issue is also including research work about the principles, the methods and the tools. The first paper, titled “A Combined Design Structure Matrix (DSM) and Discrete Differential Evolution (DDE) Approach for Scheduling and Organizing System Development Tasks Modelled using SysML” by Nonsiri et al, aims to develop a method supported by Artificial Intelligence approaches for automatically optimizing scheduling and organization of system development tasks. The purpose of this work is to support the scheduling and organization of tasks that can become very complex in system engineering process. Significant savings in term of development time can be made by providing a method that is optimizing the amount of feedbacks and iterations to the minimal level simply required for the successful development of the system. In this article, the authors are proposing to combine a computational approach (Discrete Differential Evolution) with Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) for minimizing iterations and reducing lead-time development. The present article is contributing to recent research works using Design Structure Matrixes (DSM) and computational methods for visualizing and analysing systems engineering processes. The practical use of the proposed framework is demonstrated on the case study of a mobile robot developed for the Eurobot competition. The article also