Design customisation in multi-project environments: Using process simulation to explore the issues

Adapting a design to the needs of a specific customer can be seen as a process in which an existing product is changed to incorporate desired properties and to exclude undesired ones. In a multi-project environment, many such projects are typically in execution at any given time and must compete for limited resources. Various strategies and approaches may be taken to organise such multi-project systems in order to maximise their effectiveness. This paper identifies and discusses several such strategies and shows how simulation can be used to explore their effectiveness in different contexts. Based on a case study of a simple, yet real customisation environment, we outline a discrete-event Monte-Carlo simulation model that we developed and which we argue can be used to explore some of the main issues. Although based on a simple example, we propose that the basic structure of our model could be used to derive insights for multi-project customisation environments in complex engineering domains.