A Quantitative Approach to the Organisation of Cross-Functional Teams in Concurrent Engineering

Teamwork is one of the important features of concurrent engineering (CE). Some qualitative and conceptual models of cross-functional teams in CE and their organisation patterns have been proposed in the literature. A quantitative approach to solving the team organisation problem is needed in practice, but little work has been done on this. In this paper, a mathematical model based on integer programming is proposed to formulate the team organisation problem. In the mathematical model, the following requirements for team organisation are considered: 1. The similarities between the current task and the completed tasks. 2. The technical abilities, creation abilities, management abilities, work achievements, and cooperation abilities of the developers. 3. The numbers, workloads, and utilisation rates of the developers. The team organisation problem is decomposed into a series of independent subproblems. A tabu search algorithm is proposed to solve the subproblems. And an example derived from a research institute of the Ministry of Information Industry of China is presented to illustrate the team organisation approach proposed in this paper. The computed result shows that the approach is feasible and the algorithm effective. By solving the subproblems one by one, we can obtain the solution to the whole team organisation problem.