The Effect of the Learning Process in Concurrent Engineering Projects

Abstract

Product development projects have evolved from the traditional sequential process into Concurrent Engineering (CE), which is known for its ability to reduce product development time and cost, while increasing quality. CE achieves this by overlapping the activities and executing them in parallel, which in return significantly increases iterations. The number of iterations largely depends on uncertainties in the process and learning occurs during the subsequent iterations. In this article, the effect of learning on CE projects is presented. First, the modeling of the activity structure, activity overlapping, and iterations are explained in a CE environment. Then a simulation model, which is developed by using the Arena Simulation package, is presented to test the effect of the learning process in CE projects. The simulation model developed is used to test five well-known learning theories through an extensive amount of data gathered from an industry-based project. The results suggest that all the learning models show similar behavior in terms of number of iterations required for the ultimate learning once their maximum value is reached.