Abstract

This paper proposes a mathematical programming model to select projects and their quality-standards corresponding to successively providing new products in the market. The proposed model involves the situation in which each new product development (NPD) program can be differentiated as multiple categories. Each project has multiple choices of quality/technology standards. This work proposes an approach to treat the multi-category and multi-standard project selection problem in which the scheduling is also considered concurrently under constrained periodical budget. The proposed approach consists of the following four components: 1) selecting a project advancement strategy to serve as a scheduling framework for taking into account soft factors in scheduling process, 2) employing the brand-image score of consumers as the objective function for ultimately increasing long-run average profitability, 3) formulating a computable model in which periodical budget constraints are involved and stochastic value-based time limits are specified, and 4) transforming the objective function into an appropriate form in which the parameters can be estimated more easily and the objective value can be predicated as a clear managerial implication.

Key words: New product development, project selection and scheduling, multi-choice of quality-standards, brand image, value-based time limit.