Investment Decisions in Modular Product Development

Authors

  • Ali A. Yassine Engineering Management Program, Faculty of Engineering & Architecture, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon Lebanon

Keywords:

Product development, product architecture, modularity, resource allocation, design rules

Abstract

Developing new products is critical to firms’ success and is the key for sustaining competitive advantage. Firms engaging in product development (PD) face the important problem of allocating scarce development resources to a multitude of opportunities. In this paper, we propose a mathematical formulation to optimize product development (PD) investment decisions. The model maximizes the performance of a product under development based on its product architecture and the firm’s resource constraints. The analysis of the model shows that the architecture of a product plays an essential role in affecting the optimal resource allocation to various product modules.

Author Biography

  • Ali A. Yassine, Engineering Management Program, Faculty of Engineering & Architecture, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon Lebanon

    Ali Yassine is a Professor and Chair of the Industrial Engineering & Management Departmentat the American University of Beirut. Previously,he was an Assistant Prof. at the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Prior to joining UIUC, Professor Yassine was a research scientist at MIT Center for technology, Policy and Industrial Development(CTPID) and a project manager at Chrysler International Corporation. Professor Ali Yassine is an expert in using Operations Research (OR) techniques for managing the development and operations of complex engineering systems. Professor Yassine has authored over seventy articles, in refereed academic journals and international conferences, covering Product Design & Development,Project & Portfolio Management, Systems & Entrepreneurial Engineering, and Management of Technology & Technological Innovations. Dr. Yassine received the B.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1988 from the American University of Beirut. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1989 and 1994 in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He is a member of INFORMS, ASME and PDMA

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Published

2022-05-20

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2015): The Journal of Modern Project Management

Section

Articles-JMPM

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Ali A. Yassine

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Investment Decisions in Modular Product Development. (2022). The Journal of Modern Project Management, 3(2), 141. https://journalmodernpm.com/manuscript/index.php/jmpm/article/view/196

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