The growing complexity of today’s products and the need for a short time to market lead to an increasing complexity of product development processes. Thus, coping with this growing complexity of development processes becomes more and more important for companies in order to be able to face the international competition. Besides the requirement of the market for shorter product cycles, the increasing integration of electronics and software into formerly mechanic products adds to the growing complexity of design processes. In order to meet these demands it is inevitable to deal with the process complexity and to be able to react flexibly to changes in the boundary conditions (i.e. the design situation) of product design. This contribution introduces a framework for situation specific planning of product development processes that helps to enable companies in reacting to changes on the market, in customer needs and in other important constraints of product design. The framework as well as its implementation and evaluation are discussed.     «

The growing complexity of today’s products and the need for a short time to market lead to an increasing complexity of product development processes. Thus, coping with this growing complexity of development processes becomes more and more important for companies in order to be able to face the international competition. Besides the requirement of the market for shorter product cycles, the increasing integration of electronics and software into formerly mechanic products adds to the growing compl...     »