Critical chain and evidence reasoning applied to multi-project resource schedule in automobile R&D process

To solve the multi-project resource schedule problem in automobile Research and Development (R&D) process, this paper proposes a multi-project schedule method on the basis of task priority, evidence reasoning (ER) and critical chain (CC) approach. The method is composed of a decision model, an organization model and two axioms. The author applied this method to a simple case of the R&D process of a Chinese automobile enterprise and compared the results of the proposed method with the critical chain project management (CCPM) based on project priority. As a result, the new method based on task priority, CCPM and ER is proven to be good at solving resource conflict problem in a real multi-project environment and performs better than the CCPM based on project priority.