Management of design activities in a concurrent engineering environment

Concurrent Engineering Management is an engineering management philosophy for simultaneously addressing both the engineering as well as the operational management aspects of the product design process. In this paper, the present focus is on the operational aspects of the Concurrent Engineering Management. For this purpose a quantitative decision making model is developed to manage both the cost and the schedule during the product development process. The proposed model is a fixed charge problem which is solved by a mixed integer programming algorithm. Furthermore, an example as well as a linear programming version of the model are presented.