Concurrent resource allocation (CRA): A heuristic for multi-project scheduling with resource constraints in concurrent engineering

Concurrent Engineering (CE) has gained immense popularity around the world as a means of accelerating product development, reducing cost, and increasi ng quality. CE achieves this by overlapping tasks and executing them in par allel. Different and independent surveys conclude that significant benefits can be achieved as a result of implementing CE. However, CE radically affe cts the way projects are managed due to the complexities and uncertainties caused by executing tasks with incomplete information. This requires carefu l planning and organization prior to implementing CE projects, otherwise de lays in project completion and deterioration in project performance may occ ur due to the uncertainties in the process. Although the literature suggest s that one of the essential elements for successfully implementing CE is ca reful and detailed project planning, very little attention is devoted to ad dressing this problem. This is due to the fact that CE is a relatively new concept and product development projects could be extremely complex [9]. In practice, project managers try to address uncertainty and resource allocat ion in a multi-project environment by using traditional project management tools and techniques. In this paper, a new multi-project scheduling heuristic is developed and us ed to address the problem of resource constraint scheduling in a multi-proj ect CE environment. This proposed multi-project scheduling heuristic consid ers the unique characteristics of CE projects such as concurrency and dual- level project management structure. The superior performance and capability of the proposed multi-project sched uling heuristic are demonstrated by applying them to a case study gathered from an Australian manufacturing firm. In addition, the applicability of th e available multi-project scheduling heuristics to the CE environment is al so investigated. It is concluded that the new multi-project scheduling heur istic performs better than traditional ones in terms of minimizing project completion time and optimizing resource utilization.