DECIDING BETWEEN SEQUENTIAL AND CONCURRENT TASKS IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

It is generally desirable to complete design tasks concurrently in ord er to reduce the overall development time. However, completing tasks c oncurrently may sometimes increase the total amount of rework that mus t be done, thereby increasing the total engineering effort, the develo pment cost. and the lead time. The technique described in this paper h elps to decide between serial and concurrent scheduling of multiple ta sks in a two-stage design process. Using information about task interd ependencies, this method calculates the amount of time and the amount of effort (in engineer-weeks) required for any suggested assignment of tasks to the two stages. The paper suggests an approach for minimizin g time, or effort, or both, by adjusting the schedule of which tasks s hould be completed at which time. The method is applied to data from a computer workstation design problem.