Concurrent Resource Allocation (CRA): A Heuristic for Multi-Project Scheduling with Resource Constraints in Concurrent Engineering

Abstract

Concurrent Engineering (CE) has gained immense popularity around the world as a means of accelerating product develop ment, reducing cost, and increasing quality. CE achieves this by overlapping tasks and executing them in parallel. Different and inde pendent surveys conclude that significant benefits can be achieved as a result of implementing CE. However, CE radically affects the way projects are managed due to the complexities and uncertainties caused by executing tasks with incomplete information. This re quires careful planning and organization prior to implementing CE projects, otherwise delays in project completion and deterioration in project performance may occur due to the uncertainties in the process. Although the literature suggests that one of the essential ele ments for successfully implementing CE is careful and detailed project planning, very little attention is devoted to addressing this prob lem. This is due to the fact that CE is a relatively new concept and product development projects could be extremely complex [9]. In practice, project managers try to address uncertainty and resource allocation in a multi-project environment by using traditional project management tools and techniques. In this paper, a new multi-project scheduling heuristic is developed and used to address the problem of resource constraint scheduling in a multi-project CE environment. This proposed multi-project scheduling heuristic considers the unique characteristics of CE projects such as concurrency and dual-level project management structure. The superior performance and capability of the proposed multi-project scheduling heuristic are demonstrated by applying them to a case study gathered from an Australian manufacturing firm. In addition, the applicability of the available multi-project scheduling heuristics to the CE environment is also investigated. It is concluded that the new multi-project scheduling heuristic performs better than traditional ones in terms of minimizing project completion time and optimizing resource utilization.