Workflow modeling and structuring method for product development process

Abstract

A short lead time for product commercialization is a critical advantage in the era of highly challenging competitions. It is more difficult, however, to shorten the design process rather than manufacturing process since the underlying design activities in product development process and related information are often interlinked and quite uncertain. This thesis proposes a workflow modeling and structuring method to manage and streamline the product development process, considering the fundamental characteristics of the product development process as the model constructs. The product development process should require the definition of the execution sequence of various activities (routings), and the coordination of thousands of individual design activities with complex information dependencies (iteration). In addition, the duration of every activity in the product development process, no matter how small, is a statistical quantity (stochastic). Moreover, the attempts to perform the design activities concurrently increase the complexity of the design process when the resource conflicts are considered (resource). The principal research questions in this thesis are therefore as follows: (1) how to model the product development process considering the fundamental characteristics of product development process; (2) how to estimate the performance of the product development process to evaluate the reengineering works; (3) how to (re)structure the product development process to improve the project performance, especially to explore opportunities for reducing design process lead time; (4) how to extend the workflow model to formal language tool applicable to a dynamic product environment. We propose the approach to cope with above problem statements. First, we suggest a workflow model to capture the four main characteristics - routings, iterations, stochastic, and resource - incorporating the graph-based approach (Stochastic Workflow Network) and matrix-b...