APPLICATION OF BUSINESS RULES IN DESIGN PROCESSES TO TACKLE UNCERTAINTY IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

The development of innovative industrial products and systems, like e.g. aeronautical parts, is characterized by its complex processes under tight constraints. The involvement of multiple disciplines, departments and subcontractors to plan and create the optimal solution to fulfill given requirements under the constraints of time, money and quality leads to an urgent need in professional project management and monitoring. Although project management allows the comprehensive planning of the processes, detailed workflows and their implementation cannot directly be enforced, controlled and documented. Especially the lack in documentation and traceability leads to uncertainty in project execution and monitoring, as well as unconformity within the development of vital and safety critical products and systems. Best practices are substituted by ad hoc steps to meet deadlines like milestones and sync-points. Workflow management systems, which could offer some support to reduce addressed uncertainty, do not cover all involved parties and are not directly linked to the project management, leading to characteristic problems in such development projects. This paper presents a new approach to enforce the implementation of planned project plans in development projects with multiple development parties, based on business rules to increase traceability and documentation as well as to promote the adoption of best practices in project execution. The emphasis is placed on two aspects, namely a methodology of modularization of project plans and the formulation in business rules which are to be executed in business rules management systems as well as the implementation of a best practice repository based on the project plan modules. The modularization of project plans in combination with a linked business rules management system allows on the one hand promoting best practice application in project execution and on the other hand to save gathered project planning knowledge based on the actual implementation of the plan and to reuse it in forthcoming similar projects. A further important advantage is the ability to plan and enforce documentation of the actual execution of work packages and deviation from the plan, with a major impact on traceability. The work presented here has a valuable implication on the traceability in complex development processes and facilitate the application of best practices through project management by providing project plan modules with attached rules for their implementation in workflows.