Recent Advances in Concurrent Engineering Modeling

Over the last two decades, a number of studies have examined the trade-off involved in concurrent engineering (CE), time reduction versus additional effort for downstream rework. This study presents an overview of the recent CE modeling literature that examined this trade-off. We find that most CE models are built on the assumption that development stages are dependent where the principal information exchange between consecutive design stages is unidirectional, from upstream stage to downstream stage. According to literature review and field study, we believe such assumption is reasonable, because in many situations, current execution of design stages actually occurs within two sub-stages (Testing 1 and Development 2) which are sequentially dependent. In the future, we may also build analytical models based on interdependent stages so as to better understand the impact of project properties on best CE policies and product development performance.