Partitioning Tasks to Product Development Teams

Abstract

The principle of partitioning tasks among product development teams so as to minimize the cost of interactions across design teams is an important characteristic of complex engineered systems. Although there is growing literature that deals with the proper organization of product development tasks, little attention is given to rigorous modeling of the phenomena. To fill the void, we present a mathematical formulation for the problem. Two main issues are addressed by the model: 1) how to specify task dependencies, and 2) how to optimally partition the tasks among a number of teams. Characteristics of the problem are analyzed, and an efficient solution procedure is proposed. The developed model and solution technique can be applied to various scales of the product design and development process, and may open a variety of interesting questions.