OPTIMIZATION OF INDUSTRIAL-SCALE SCHEDULING PROBLEMS IN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

This paper describes the optimization of the. New Product Development process of DowElanco an agricultural chemical company. It outlines how DowElanco created a model capturing the effects of four complications present in their New Product Development process. It reviews previous academic work on optimizing a New Product Development process, which has only addressed one of the four complications. An industrial scale, reproducible example is provided to demonstrate that when subject to the assumptions of the-academic models, real world problems are more h ighly structured than randomly generated problems, which provides a co mputational advantage. This allows much larger problems to be optimize d than had previously been reported. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Sc ience Ltd. All rights reserved.