Modelling mutual dependencies between products architecture and network of partners

Almost every New Product Development (NPD) project requires collaboration of lots of partners and especially of those who participate to the design and realization of some modules of the final product. Design and realisation of such final products cannot be conceived without considering logical, temporal and physical constraints of project partners. The main idea of this article is to study the links between the architectures of a physical product and a network of partners. Product architecture is modelled from on side by the generalized Bill-Of-Materials and Operation (gBOMO) formalism and from the other by the interfaces graph which explains the coupling of components. The necessary synchronization situations among partners are extracted from the gBOMO, modelled then by a synchronisation graph. The interfaces and synchronization graphs allow determining various logical dependencies between suppliers, sub-contractors and the Focal Company (FC), the initiator of the NPD project. The main interest of these tools is that they make explicit various dependency links, especially hidden ones, between the partners and supporting project managers and designers in their tasks. These tools are applied to the case of the engine assembly of Renault™ to illustrate the proposed concepts