Estimation of Project Completion Time and Factors Analysis for Concurrent Engineering Project Management: A Simulation Approach

In concurrent engineering projects, tasks are usually interdependent among each other that require much iteration before completion where the critical path method/program evaluation and review technique (CPM/PERT) may not be applicable to help estimate the project duration. In addition, carrying out a large-scaled project in a dynamic environment has to deal with various factors at the same time. When estimating the project completion time, previous research often focused on one subject of interest and assumed the other factors causing little effect on the overall project duration. The objective of this article is to develop a research framework to help estimate the project completion time and analyze the major factors that affect the estimation for complex concurrent engineering projects. The framework consists of three major components: (1) data collection, where the needed data for simulation are prepared including project task structure, task relations, and quantified team member characteristics; (2) simulation, where tasks are dynamically assigned to the appropriate members/engineers according to each member's knowledge level of the task, teamwork capability, work schedule availability, and learning curve improvement; and (3) data analysis, where significant factors to the project completion time are studied by the ANOVA analysis based on the simulation results. The effectiveness of our framework and the simulation model is demonstrated by an illustrative example.