A fuzzy project scheduling approach to minimize schedule risk for product development
The efficient management of product development projects is important to reduce the required development time and cost. However, each project is unique in nature and the duration of activities involved in a project often cannot be predicted accurately. The uncertainty of activity duration may lead to incorrect scheduling decisions, The objective of this research is to develop a fuzzy scheduling methodology to deal with this problem. Possibility theory is used to model the uncertain and flexible temporal information. The concept of schedule risk is proposed to evaluate the schedule performance. A fuzzy beam search algorithm is developed to determine a schedule with the minimum schedule risk and the start time of each activity is selected to maximize the minimum satisfaction degrees of all temporal constraints. In addition, the properties of schedule risk are also discussed. We show that the proposed methodology can assist project managers in selecting a schedule with the least possibility of being late in an uncertain scheduling environment. An example with an electronic product development project is used to illustrate the developed approach. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
project scheduling product development possibility theory fuzzy constraint satisfaction