A study to identify engineering design resources in complex product development projects

The planning and scheduling of appropriate resources is essential in engineering design for delivering quality products on time, within cost and at acceptable risk. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to identify and understand the different resources required. This paper attempts to do so through insights drawn from interviews in an aerospace company. Firstly, it investigates what elements have been considered design resources by current modelling approaches and how the approaches have managed resources. Secondly, interviews identified that key design resources does not only include designers but also computational, testing and prototyping resources. Thirdly, the paper introduces resource attributes that can impact on resource availability and their effectiveness on process performance. Fourthly, it proposes a set of requirements to distinguish design resources from company resources. Finally, it advocates for having allocation flexibility to balance all these resources within the process, requiring new approaches for planning and scheduling that can model resources along with their attributes.