A study of overlapping and functional interaction mechanisms for concurrent engineering processes

Abstract

This article reports the use of a stochastic computer model to study hybrid overlapping and functional interaction strategies, where, within a given process, different degrees of overlapping or gradually increasing or decreasing functional interaction were modeled. The study aims to understand the contribution of these strategies to process performance, that is, product development effort and span time. Simulation results of the hybrid models are discussed in comparison to a baseline model, where the baseline process was uniformly overlapped and functional interaction was constant throughout its execution. Research outcomes indicate that under high information uncertainty, sequential processes perform better than any model with overlap. When uncertainty is moderate or low, the baseline model outperforms the hybrid models. Under high sensitivity conditions, hybrid overlapping models perform equally well in comparison to the baseline model with complete overlap, and superiorly when information evolution is slow.