1.5.1 A Decision Support System to Schedule Design Activities in Aircraft Industry

This paper highlights the relationship between Project Management and Systems Engineering through a framework proposal that links dependencies management and project scheduling. It investigates the problems of project scheduling at the design stage of the development of a civil aircraft, mainly characterised by a dynamic environment and uncertainties concerning the duration of activities. This framework is supported by methods dedicated to the management of schedules at tactical levels with fully elastic tasks that takes into account dependencies between design teams as new constraints. For end users, this framework can be considered as a Decision Support System (DSS). The DSS is a tool to check if all scheduling constraints are satisfied or to solve over-constrained problems through interactions with end-users. This approach, illustrated with AIRBUS use cases, is flexible enough to be implemented within the aerospace industry, by facilitating cooperation between design teams and by providing the possibility to carry out schedules simulations.