Concurrent Engineering and Design Oscillations in Complex Engineering Projects

Abstract

Coordination among many interdependent actors is key activity in complex product development projects. The challenge is made more difficult in concurrent engineering processes, as more activities happen in parallel and interact. This coordination becomes progressively more difficult with project size. We do not yet sufficiently understand whether this effect can be controlled with frequent and rich communication among project members, or whether it is inevitable. Recent work in complexity theory suggests that a project might form a “rugged landscape”, for which performance deterioration with system size is inevitable. This article builds a mathematical model of a complex concurrent design project. The model explicitly represents local component decisions, as well as component interactions in determining system performance. The model shows, first, how a rugged performance landscape arises from simple components with single-peaked performance functions, if the components are interdependent. Second, we characterize the dynamic behavior of the system analytically and with simulations. We show under which circumstances it exhibits performance oscillations or divergence to design solutions with low performance. Third, we derive classes of managerial actions available to improve performance dynamics, such as limiting the “effective” system size of fully interdependent components, modularity, and cooperation among designers. We also show how “satisficing”, or a willingness to forego the last few percent of optimization at the component level, may yield a disproportionally large improvement in the design completion time.

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