Abstract
Because of increasing pressure to sustain competitive advantages, it is crucial topic for manufacturers to reduce product development cost and lead-time while maintaining a high level of quality. These requirements drive the companies to focus on organizing a well-coordinated development plan for allocating processes and resources. This paper reports our concept toward a system for planning processes for preliminaly design and detail design, and evaluating them. Three indices for design process evaluation are introduced; lead-time, cost and quality. The indices are defined for each activity, which composes a design process, as a function of the iteration number of the activity. Because there are some stochastic factors for the iteration of the activity, the evaluation indices should be estimated with variance. The system supports (i) knowledge-based selection of design activities which are required for achieving design process and (ii) estimating cost, lead-time and quality of design process based-on scheduling simulation.
