A Mathematical Model for optimization of Product Development Process

Product development process has its specific complexity. This complexity can also be due to overlapping and dependent relationships (coupling) amongst activities in a product development process. On one hand overlapping may reduce duration of a project on the other, it engenders rework risk. In addition, coupled activities are another reason for rework risk too. This iteration and rework caused by overlapping and coupling of activities results in increasing time and cost of the project. In this article, a mathematical model is presented to study the characteristics of the product development process and also to balance the duration and cost of it. According to the overlapping and the amount of dependent relationships among activities, four types of time models have been formulated. Furthermore to verify the process, the model has been implemented in MATLAB and an example has been solved. It is observed that the proposed model is easily able to calculate the time and cost of the process in all four types.