Project Planning and Control

Research Theme: Process Management

This project investigates how iterative development projects can be supported through new methods and tools that increase the fidelity of plans and reduce the cost of re-planning.

Complex design processes are difficult to manage due to the difficulty of understanding the workflow, the difficulty of monitoring and the specialised nature of design knowledge which means that few individuals have an overview of the entire project. Most planning scheduling tools used in practice cannot represent uncertainty in task definition and ordering. Yet this is very common in design.

Objectives

  • Develop planning approaches that are useful under uncertainty in task definition and ordering.
  • Develop algorithms to identify schedules that are robust to uncertainties in project execution.
  • Develop pragmatic methods to support monitoring and re-planning with imprecise metrics.

Selected Publications

  • WYNN, D.C. and CLARKSON, P.J. (2009) 'Design project planning, monitoring and re-planning through process simulation', ICED'09