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Ogura, Masaki (1); Kishida, Masako (2); Yassine, Ali (3)

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Abstract:

Project managers are continuously under pressure to shorten product development durations. One practical approach for reducing the project duration is lessening dependencies between different development components and teams. In this paper, we present an analytical framework for optimally allocating resources to shorten the lead-time of product development projects having a time-varying dependency structure. We build our theoretical framework on a linear system model of product development processes, in which system integration and local development teams exchange information asynchronously and aperiodically. By utilizing a convexity result from matrix theory, we show that optimal resource allocation can be efficiently found by solving a convex optimization problem. We provide an illustrative example to demonstrate the proposed framework.

Keywords:

Project management, resource management, resource allocation systems, time/cost/performance trade-offs, project planning