A concurrent engineering decision model: Management of the project activities information flows

Management of information flows is a basic tool to control project activities. 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’). The more two activities are informatively linked, the more important is their coordinated execution, i.e. their parallel or concurrent execution. A concurrent scheduling of linked activities allows us to control efficiently their interaction and evolution. The aim of this paper is to present a decision support model to decide which activities primarily need to be concurrently scheduled and in what measure, in order to coordinate information flows, enhance requirements reconfigurability and minimize errors and unplanned evolution of the activities.