Reliability Modeling and Optimization of New Product Development (NPD) Process

The development of complex engineering products often needs to overcome many challenges such as meeting the development budget, release time, and performance goals. The new product development processes have been experiencing such challenges in an increasingly competitive global market environment. Specifically, the reliability of the new product has always been a major concern for new product developers and it has been a difficulty to balance the development cost and time while sustaining high product reliability.

The main goal of this talk is to develop methodologies to support new product developers meet their product requirements and strategic business goals. This research consists of two main parts. In the first part, a novel methodology in modeling and optimizing the reliability growth is proposed, which considers the multiple stages of a new product development process and provides an optimal reliability growth plan in terms of time, cost, and the reliability of the newly developed products. The proposed approach differs from the existing research in the literature by, (1) considering multiple stages of the reliability growth program in the early stages of the new product development process, and (2) optimizing all three new product development goals simultaneously. The second part of this research provides an innovative approach to model and optimize the planning of a verification and validation (V&V) process in the early stages when designing a new product. This mathematical approach provides an optimal way of implementing a design verification and validation process to have maximum reliability improvement of a new product under development, when the implementation time and cost are limited.