Management of Risk and Uncertainty in Product Development Processes
Abstract
The goal of the Unified Life Cycle Engineering (ULCE) program is to develop enhanced design environments that will allow supportability and producibility to be considered early in the product design cycle along with the usual factors of cost, performance, and schedule. This paper considers the engineering management aspects of one approach to ULCE: an overlapping development process in which technology development, design, manufacturing process planning, and support process planning are conducted in parallel. Such a process, commonly called concurrent engineering, has shown considerable promise in commercial industry in reducing development lead time, reducing product cost, and improving quality. However, such a process also requires much more careful management due to the increased risk and uncertainties which result from the incomplete information transfers which must of necessity occur between the teams performing the different phases of the development. This paper presents an analytical approach to management of overlapping development processes in the face of such risks and uncertainties. The approach taken is similar to that of Taguchi in that a key aspect of the method is the development of a loss function which is used to gauge the relative undesirability of various courses of action in the development process.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 1989
- Accession Number
- ADA211196
Entities
People
- Edison Tse
- William E. Cralley
Organizations
- Institute for Defense Analyses