Estimating the duration of stochastic workflow for product development process

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to consider a stochastic workflow in the product development process with both random activity durations and predefined resource constraint and to develop the method of estimating the completion time in the product development process. We first present a stochastic workflow considering resource constraints and then develop a method to estimate the parameters of completion time in the product development process using a Markovian model. We present a practical case study to show that our method can be effectively used in practice. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.