Project Scheduling Problem And Project Management Information System For Product Development

The fierce market competition forces modern enterprises to carry out product innovations by product development processes continually. Effectively managing product development processes and enhancing their executive power play the key roles on innovation ability and core competitiveness of enterprises. There are many literatures relating to product development process recently. However most of them concern on the product development process modeling and analysis, which belongs to the kind of qualitative study and cannot be directly used to project planning and controlling. Product development processes are usually organized in the form of projects, and the project management is of key importance to product development. As a basic project management technology, compared with other technologies, project network plan technology is not very adapted to product development process modeling. Nevertheless, it has been widely used in the planning and controlling of product process management. Basic network plan technology is a pure time optimization method, which cannot meet to the demands of modern project management. On the basis of network plan technology, project scheduling problems support project decision makers to make an optimal plan by balancing more project factors, such as resources, makespan, cost and quality et al. For enhancing the management capabilities product development project, it is very necessary to study the project scheduling problems and their solutions by applying project scheduling theory according to the characteristics of product development projects. Additionaly, product development project management is an enterprise-wide business process, where various project stakeholders are involved. The current supporting tools of product development focus on the technology management on the view of technical personnels, and it has only a weak ability of project management, which is only used to assign design tasks in general. There are urgent requirements to integrate the technology and management of product development based on the analysis and modeling of product development project management, and the work in this area will improve the effectiveness of the information system of product development project.In this thesis, by using the theories and approaches of system engineering, we investigate the project scheduling problems of product development projects and their solutions. A product development project management information system is designed and developed. The major work focuses on the following six points:(1) The related research works are reviewed. Through consulting a lot of correlative researches, we review the current researches on product development process, project management, project scheduling and project management information system.(2) A representive project scheduling problem with the makespan minimization is studied. The justification technology is used to improve the traditional serial schedule scheme. An ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for solving multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MMRCPSP) is developed. To enhance the generality and performance of the algorithm, the priority rules pool is used to manage a large number of priority rules. Each ant is provided with a single thread and ants have some learning ability to select the excellent priority rules during the algorithm execution. Ants have some pre-judgment ability to cut those non-feasible routes based on the branch and bound method. Finally, a full factorial computational experiment is set up using the well-known standard instanced in PSPLIB, and computational results reveal that the algorithm is effective for MMRCPSP.(3) The discrete time/cost tradeoff problem is studied according to the characteristics of product development projects. The project cost in product development project is divided into renewable resource cost and the nonrenewable resource cost. The former occurs with the occupation of human resources during the make span of the project, and the latter occurs when some activities are performed in the crashing way by overtime work. On the base of the calculation method of project cost, a discrete time/cost tradeoff problem for product development (PD-DTCTP) is presented. An improved genetic algorithm for solving it is developed and its effectiveness is verified. The advantages of PD-DTCTP are discussed based on an entire time-cost tradeoff curve.(4) The quality management of product development project is studied. By applying the quality function deployment (QFD) technology, an activity based quality method is presented to calculate project quality. A discrete time/cost/quality trade-off model for product development (PD-DTCQTP) is built on the basis of PD-DTCTP. A brand and cut algorithm is addressed to solve the problem. Finally the model and its algorithm are verified by a project case.(5) Aiming at the uncertainty of activity duration in product development projects, the theory and application of critical chain method is studied. The critical chain method used in product development projects should be generated based on active schedule. To generate the critical chain project plan, this thesis presents a priority-based critical chain generated scheme, in which the active plan is generated and then the unique critical chain can be achieved according to a priority list. A project scheduling problem which optimizes the critical chain based on active plan is presented. For solving the problem, a genetic algorithm is designed.(6) The product development project management information system is studied. The requirements of product development project reconfiguration are discussed, and the project plan template is used to realize the reconfiguration. Considering all the project stakeholders and integrating the PDM and workflow management system, the product development project management information system is modeled, including organization model, business process model, system use case model and software architecture. Finally, the product development project management information system is developed and implemented.