Abstract: Scheduling activities in concurrent product development process is of great significance to shorten development lead time and minimize the cost; moreover, it can eliminate the unnecessary redesign periods and guarantee that serial activities can be executed as concurrently as possible. This paper presents a constraint satisfaction neural network and heuristic combined approach for concurrent activities scheduling. In the combined approach, the neural network is used to obtain feasible starting time of all the activities based on sequence constraints, the heuristic algorithm is used to obtain feasible solution of the scheduling problem based on resource constraints. The feasible scheduling solution is obtained by a gradient optimization function. Applications have shown that the proposed combined approach is efficient and feasible with respect to concurrent activities scheduling.

Key words: concurrent engineering, product development process, heuristic, constraints satisfaction neural network, scheduling problem