Development process simulation using “Signposting”

Developed at Cambridge, Signposting is a task-based method for modelling engineering design processes. It supports the creation of a generic design process for a project type from the details and concerns of a specific instance. Previous work in Signposting has dealt primarily with a single stream of activity, which, while appropriate for the original role in supporting a single designer or small team, is unsuited to a modelling approach which has grown to encompass the whole design process. This paper describes a simulation-based extension to Signposting, supporting concurrency and resourcing issues, allowing the effects of changing hard and soft task precedences on project cost, duration, etc. to be investigated. By way of example, the simulation tool is applied to a number of existing Signposting models. Visualisation of the likely outcomes of the project is made straightforward through ensemble distributions, allowing the effects of changes to task ordering to be clearly seen. Extensions to the method to support project management and development process optimisation are discussed. In particular, it will be possible to extract the key features of successful and unsuccessful instances of the process in the simulation, which will indicate critical tasks and performance measures for the project.