Project managers are continuously under pressure to shorten product development durations. One practical approach for reducing the project duration is lessening dependencies between different development components and teams. However, most of the resource allocation strategies for lessening dependencies place the implicit and simplistic assumption that the dependency structure between components is static (i.e., does not change over time). This assumption, however, does not necessarily hold true in all product development projects. In this paper, we present an analytical framework for optimally allocating resources to shorten the lead time of product development projects having a time-varying dependency structure. We build our theoretical framework on a linear system model of product development processes, in which system integration and local development teams exchange information asynchronously and aperiodically. Utilizing a convexity result from the matrix theory, we show that the optimal resource allocation can be efficiently found by solving a convex optimization problem. We provide illustrative examples to demonstrate the proposed framework. We also present boundary analyses based on major graph models to provide managerial guidelines for improving empirical PD processes.

中文翻译：

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时变依赖结构产品开发项目的资源优化

项目经理一直面临着缩短产品开发时间的压力。减少项目持续时间的一种实用方法是减少不同开发组件和团队之间的依赖关系。然而，大多数用于减少依赖的资源分配策略都隐含和简单地假设组件之间的依赖结构是静态的（即不随时间变化）。然而，这种假设并不一定适用于所有产品开发项目。在本文中，我们提出了一个优化分配资源的分析框架，以缩短具有时变依赖结构的产品开发项目的交付周期。我们在产品开发过程的线性系统模型上构建我们的理论框架，其中系统集成和本地开发团队异步和不定期地交换信息。利用矩阵理论的凸性结果，我们表明可以通过求解凸优化问题有效地找到最佳资源分配。我们提供了说明性示例来演示所提出的框架。我们还提出了基于主要图形模型的边界分析，以提供改进经验 PD 过程的管理指南。