Coordination policies in product development with rework

This paper investigates the performance of coupled development activities with rework by proposing a quantitative model based on a performance generation model (PGM). The objective of our model is to develop insights about optimal strategies (i.e., sequential, concurrent, or overlapped) to improve project performance, overlapping and coordination policies with rework and time-cost tradeoff involved in concurrent product development. Model analysis characterizes the solution space for the coupled development problem. Specifically, our analysis revealed the presence of four separate regions in the optimal coordination policies in product development: sequential strategy, concurrent strategy, early overlapping strategy, and late overlapping strategy. Also, we provide the explicit corresponding conditions for these four policies as demonstrated in theorems 1-4.