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Scheduling Tests in Automotive R&D Projects Using a Genetic Algorithm

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Handbook on Project Management and Scheduling Vol. 2

Part of the book series: International Handbooks on Information Systems ((INFOSYS))

Abstract

For each car model an automotive manufacturer has to perform hundreds of tests on prototype vehicles before mass production can be started. In this chapter we present heuristic methods for scheduling the individual tests in automotive R&D projects such that the number of required experimental vehicles and hence the testing costs are minimized. The problem at hand can be interpreted as a multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem with minimum and maximum time lags and cumulative resources. We present forward and backward variants of a priority-rule based method as well as a genetic algorithm based on an activity list representation. The presented methods are examined in a comprehensive computational study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A maximum inventory \(\overline{R}_{v_{k}}:= 1\) cannot be exceeded as each test must have depleted the inventory of the used resource before replenishing it and at most one prototyping activity per resource exists.

  2. 2.

    The test sets are available at the following URL: https://www.wiwi.tu-clausthal.de/testsets-evt/.

  3. 3.

    Nota bene: A deeper analysis of this phenomenon has shown that for smaller sample sizes (e.g., 100 calculated solutions) the priority-rule based method leads to better results than the sampling algorithm.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Consultant at McKinsey & Company, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Jan-Hendrik Bartels

  2. Institute of Management and Economics, Clausthal University of Technology, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Jürgen Zimmermann

Authors
  1. Jan-Hendrik Bartels
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  2. Jürgen Zimmermann
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Correspondence to Jürgen Zimmermann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Management and Economics, Clausthal University of Technology, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Christoph Schwindt

  2. Institute of Management and Economics, Clausthal University of Technology, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Jürgen Zimmermann

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Bartels, JH., Zimmermann, J. (2015). Scheduling Tests in Automotive R&D Projects Using a Genetic Algorithm. In: Schwindt, C., Zimmermann, J. (eds) Handbook on Project Management and Scheduling Vol. 2. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05915-0_22

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