Structuring NPD processes: advancements in test scheduling and activity sequencing

Abstract

Efficient New Product Development (NPD) processes are critical to the success of many modern corporations. To structure NPD processes, this thesis focuses on two key decision problems: test scheduling and activity sequencing, and consists of two parts. The first part deals with test scheduling problem. Past studies, which are developed to determine the optimal scheduling of tests, often focused on single-stage testing of sequential process. We present two analytical models for the optimal scheduling of tests in overlapped process which is a common practice to reduce project completion time. The second part deals with activity sequencing problem. Recently, Deign Structure Matrix (DSM) has been regarded as an effective tool for scheduling NPD projects, and has spawned many research efforts on sequencing activities with the objective of minimizing feedbacks. However, the problem is NP-complete. To solve large-scale problems, we prove several properties of the solution, and present two new decomposition based approaches. Finally, in some situations, activity dependencies may not be precisely estimated, we therefore present a fuzzy approach to DSM sequencing problem. Throughout this thesis, the usefulness of analytical results and algorithms proposed has been validated through case studies and numerical examples.