Concurrent Engineering Projects Research Articles

Concurrent Resource Allocation (CRA): A Heuristic for Multi-Project Scheduling with Resource Constraints in Concurrent Engineering

Concurrent Engineering (CE) has gained immense popularity around the world as a means of accelerating product develop ment, reducing cost, and increasing quality. CE achieves this by overlapping tasks and executing them in parallel. Different and inde pendent surveys conclude that significant benefits can be achieved as a result of implementing CE. However, CE radically affects the way projects are managed due to the complexities and uncertainties caused by executing tasks with incomplete information. This re quires careful planning and organization prior to implementing CE projects, otherwise delays in project completion and deterioration in project performance may occur due to the uncertainties in the process. Although the literature suggests that one of the essential ele ments for successfully implementing CE is careful and detailed project planning, very little attention is devoted to addressing this prob lem. This is due to the fact that CE is a relatively new concept and product development projects could be extremely complex [9]. In practice, project managers try to address uncertainty and resource allocation in a multi-project environment by using traditional project management tools and techniques. In this paper, a new multi-project scheduling heuristic is developed and used to address the problem of resource constraint scheduling in a multi-project CE environment. This proposed multi-project scheduling heuristic considers the unique characteristics of CE projects such as concurrency and dual-level project management structure. The superior performance and capability of the proposed multi-project scheduling heuristic are demonstrated by applying them to a case study gathered from an Australian manufacturing firm. In addition, the applicability of the available multi-project scheduling heuristics to the CE environment is also investigated. It is concluded that the new multi-project scheduling heuristic performs better than traditional ones in terms of minimizing project completion time and optimizing resource utilization.

A note on measuring parallelism in concurrent engineering

This note introduces a measure of parallelism for activity networks, and we suggest its relevance to concurrent engineering efforts. The importance of the ability to judge the degree of parallelism in a concurrent engineering project is discussed. Then, a brief review of the existing measures of parallelism is provided. Due to the drawbacks of some of these measures, a new measure, Omega, is introduced and its performance is compared to the other measures. The results indicate that Omega is an excellent measure of parallelism, particularly for application in concurrent engineering.

Towards the integration of concurrent engineering environments within organisational strategy

In an increasingly uncertain marketplace manufacturing organisations are striving to find new ways to meet customer requirements for competitively priced, customised products, delivered in shorter lead times. It is argued that to meet these demands there is a need to integrate the design, development and production functions within a concurrent engineering (CE) environment. The literature reports many cases of failed CE projects. One of the main reasons for this failure is believed to be a lack of formal methodologies to assist organisations with the processes required to move from sequential to concurrent product development phases. This paper describes the Cougar methodology which has been developed specifically to address this issue. The paper initially outlines briefly the progression of ideas within organisational theory from classical to contemporary strategy. It then considers the development and application of the Cougar methodology. Finally, a case study is described detailing the success of the concept within a leading UK engineering company with observations and proposals for further organisational analysis.

Modelling Concurrent Engineering Projects Under Uncertainty

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is known for its ability to reduce product development time and cost, while it increases quality. CE achieves this by overlapping the activities and executing them in parallel. This requires careful planning and organisation prior to im plementing CE projects, otherwise it may cause delays in project completion and deterioration in project performance due to uncertain ties in the process. In this paper, a probabilistic mathematical model fitted to the precedence relations is proposed to estimate the project completion time under uncertainty while simulating the randomness in the process.

Managing integration and coordination in cross‐functional teams: an international study of Concurrent Engineering product development

This study is about the influence of integration and coordination of organisational mechanisms on the effectiveness of the process of product development by cross‐functional teams. The sample consists of 50 cross‐national Concurrent Engineering (CE) project teams, from companies in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, UK, and USA, in the technology intensive industries of aerospace, automobile, chemical, computer, electronics, shipbuilding, and telecommunications. The study offers a diagnostic tool which measures the effectiveness of the Concurrent Engineering team’s process in terms of the behaviours and attitudes of the engineering/R&D and manufacturing representatives on the product development team: (a) two‐way communication, (b) overlapping problems‐solving, (c) readiness to use uncertain and ambiguous information released by team counterparts for decision‐making, and (d) readiness to release uncertain and ambiguous information to team counterparts. The findings of the study are that integration mechanisms, such as team‐based rewards and job rotation, and coordination mechanisms, such as project structure and information technology, and project leader’s management style, support an effective team process, and overcome the negative effect of geographic distance and time‐difference in cross‐national teams. In addition, there are interesting implications for organisational learning in the practice of Concurrent Engineering for product development, and of the implications of these findings for practice and future research.

Intelligent Models for Collaborative Construction Engineering

Many critical issues still need to be tackled properly in order to manage concurrent engineering projects effectively. These issues include versioning, notification, and propagation, all of which need to be addressed throughout the construction project lifecycle. To this end, the COMMIT project strives to achieve an improved level of support for the versioning of project information at both the conceptual (schema evolution) and the instance levels. Versioning, notification, and propagation are addressed through the CIMM (a generic and context‐independent information management model for supporting collaborative construction projects) and are described in this paper. The main concepts of the construction‐oriented COMMIT Canonical Model (CCM), specialized from the CIMM, are also presented, followed by a description of the first prototype implementation of the CIMM tackling information versioning. This research is ongoing and supported by a well‐established U.K. steering group.

Tools and teams: competing models of integrated product development project performance

Three models of the relationship between the tools and methods of integrated product development or concurrent engineering (CE) and project task performance are specified and tested on an international, multi-industry sample of CE project teams. The three models drawn from the literature are, respectively, a `linear independence' CE tools model, a `reciprocal interaction' CE tools model, and a `serial' CE tools plus intervening team effectiveness model. Comparison of the model tests lends support to a composite, serial multipath specification where both team effectiveness and the CE methods for increasing development process simultaneity contribute directly to project performance and mediate the contributions of other CE tools. Team effectiveness was higher for teams using CE tools and methods which standardize engineering methodologies. The use of simultaneity methods was higher for project teams using some other CE tools. CE Tools for data integration and for increased customer input made no contribution to project task performance. The model specifying an interactive synergy between the tools and methods of CE was the least successful. Most of the benefits from the tools and methods of CE can be achieved by focusing implementation effort on increasing simultaneity in the development process and improving team decision-making effectiveness.

Driving concurrency in a distributed concurrent engineering project team: a specification for an Engineering Moderator

SUMMARY Industry requires CAE systems of the future to be highly flexible and to provide support on multiple levels: assisting the activities both of individual engineers and of complete product design teams. The CAE system must provide accurate, consistent information to all users. It should also actively promote exchange of information and knowledge between team members. In outline an architecture for CAE systems of the future is proposed, and the purpose and structure of the various elements of this architecture are discussed. In particular a specialist, supervisory, co-ordinator application, called the Engineering Moderator is introduced in detail, and its performance requirements specified. This application addresses some fundamental requirements for provision of support for team working in a concurrent engineering environment, by encouraging and facilitating communication between team members.

Composing and combining complex designs from different project perspectives

A set of data manipulation and visualization tools is presented that act over engineering information from separate sources representing different perspectives on the same problem. The information is in the form of low-level transmitted data and enhanced data in the form of separate hierarchies that can be created independently by different (teams of ) users or by enhancing the low-level, external data while maintaining the external relationship for the purpose of updating. The separation of hierarchies appeals to some fairly pragmatic technological or scien-tific principles from the domain in question. The POISE mechanism presented here provides a way in which these organizationally distinct, discipline-specific information hierarchies can be accessed when answering a query and visualized for browsing or editing purposes. The control over this system of intercommunication between separate perspectives is by a system of message delegation. Responsibility for responding to a message passes around a small society of active objects that can each contribute their own partial knowledge. This technique of allowing objects to offer part of the answer to one original query marks a considerable expansion of the features of a design or project database. The importance of a scheme of message delegation, such as the one implemented in POISE, is that concurrent engineering projects frequently need to work with well organized but partial information sources. Manufacturing, product, and materials information manipulated for engineering decision-making purposes is

The Virtual Design Team: Modeling organizational behavior of concurrent design teams

AbstractConcurrent engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and the related processes of manufacturing and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from concept through disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements. To achieve successful concurrent-engineering design, one needs an integrated framework, a well-organized design team, and adequate design tools. The research on concurrent engineering to date has focused on developing communication infrastructure, design tools, and product data representations. Little attention has been paid to developing tools to address the organizational issues involved in concurrent engineering. The authors’ research on the Virtual Design Team (VDT) attempts to develop a computerized analysis tool to sup-port the systematic design of organization structures for concurrent engineering projects. VDT is a computer simulation system. It takes descriptions of design tasks, actors (i.e., designers and managers), and organization structure as input, and produces predicted historical records of the actors’ design and coordination behavior, project du-ration, cost, and design process quality as output. VDT has been applied to model more than ten realistic engineering projects, and the results are qualitatively consistent with the predictions from theory and project managers. The VDT framework for modeling concurrent-engineering teams is described, and examples of VDT applications are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Virtual Design Team approach to modeling the organizational behavior of concurrent design teams.

Planning and control of concurrent engineering projects

The engineering process provides technical documents. It can be modeled by extending the Walrasian model. Concurrent engineering involves shortening of lead time and life cycle engineering. Shortening of lead time can be done by choosing an uncertainty level and using an iterative algorithm to determine optimal concurrency. Cost uncertainty can be included by adding contingency. Cost and time uncertainty in a project can be catered for by providing risk buffers.

Automated Configuration Management in Concurrent Engineering Projects

A large engineering project involves participation of many engineers from multiple disciplines The participating engineers work concurrently on their respective designs, and the large amount of data associated with their discipline-specific designs requires efficient data and configuration management support throughout the design process. One of the essential aspects of configuration management is the detection, notification, and resolution of design inconsistencies in a configuration of project databases This paper proposes automated configuration management based on design databases which represent discipline-specific designs in a project, and specified constraints which represent the requirements on these designs A DCV approach consisting of databases (D), constraints (C), and violations (V) is presented In engineering projects, both the data and constraints should scale as the project progresses and, therefore, this approach makes the constraints persistent in the databases to allow efficient storage and management of both the data and constraints The violations identify inconsistencies and store the results of the constraint checking process on configuration databases Early identification and notification of design inconsistencies will result in consistent project configurations with fewer design changes and less engineering reworks

RASP and RSYST - Two Complementary Program Libraries for Concurrent Control Engineering

RASP?) is a control engineering numerical subroutine library to support the simulation. analysis and design of dynamic systems by frequency-and time-domain methods as well as multi-criteria parameter optimization. Emphasis is on numerically reliable and well-conditioned problem solutions RSYST 3 ) is an engineering database system to support a modular integration of large engineering-science FORTRAN programs based on the concepts of abstract datatypes. Emphasis is on an efficient and flexible handling of complex engineering data objects. ANDECS* 4 ) is a Concurrent Control Engineering project. It is a “programmable control engineering tool machine” based on RASP and RSYST.