A concurrent engineering decision model: Parallel running of activities linked through information flows

Management of information flow is a basic tool for controlling project activities. In fact operations belonging to an activity (each activity is composed of several operations) can generate, during their execution, flows of information which affect or modify the execution of other operations belonging to other activities. The information flows among operations link project activities (‘information or decision link’). Investigating operations' mutual interactions allows us, for each pair of activities, to quantify the relative information link through an index. This index is very important.