A major challenge in the creation of custom-designed products lies in the elicitation of customer needs. As customers are frequently unable to accurately articulate their needs, designers typically create one or several prototypes, which they then present to the customer. This process, which we...

An important managerial problem in product design in the extent to which testing activities are carried out in parallel or in series. Parallel testing has the advantage of proceeding more rapidly than serial testing but does not take advantage of the potential for learning between tests, thus...

We present an analytical model of concurrent engineering, where an upstream and a down-stream task are overlapped to minimize time-to-market. The gain from overlapping activities must be weighed against the delay from rework that results from proceeding in parallel based on preliminary...