Optimized evaluation point designing for R&D project

Having been widely adopted in the management of research and development (R&D) projects, concurrent engineering can largely shorten the time limits for projects, however, its risk is higher. A risk model of implementing concurrent engineering was built. The optimum decision point is exactly the intersection between the risk versus technological-maturity relation curve and the time versus risk relation curve, and the classification of risks in R&D projects was proposed. Setting valid evaluation point is effective to control and reduce the risks, and a method to identify the optimized evaluation points was designed. In the method, the risks of each task can be determined by technological risk factors, scheduling risk factors and parallel risk factors, and then the overall risk of the project can be determined by the summation of all the risk values. A numerical example was used to demonstrate that the overall risk of R&D projects can be effectively reduced through the optimized evaluation point designing.