Scheduling and Coordination of Distributed Design Projects

Abstract In the era of time-based competition, companies are tending to distribute product design across regions to cut short design cycles and better penetrate local markets. This distributed design involves many uncertainties and risks, and generating good decentralized schedules and effectively coordinating distributed activities without intruding organizations' propriety information and decision-making authorities are important and challenging. This paper studies the scheduling and coordination of distributed design projects with uncertainties while managing design risks. A novel mathematical optimization model that balances modeling accuracy and computation complexity is presented, and a solution methodology that combines Lagrangian relaxation and stochastic dynamic programming is developed. Numerical results demonstrate that near optimal solutions are obtained, and uncertainties are effectively managed for problems of practical sizes.