Proposing a new scheduling model for new product/service development projects, by consideration of the distribution index of activities

Rapid changes in customer needs have decreased the life cycle of products or services in recent years. Thus, it can be concluded that companies need to present new products or services. In this paper, the new product/service development scheduling problem was analysed in addition to the probabilistic distribution of task time by simultaneously considering certain indices including the number of tasks, the serial/parallel quality of tasks, and the temporal distribution of tasks. The indices associated with the new product/service development projects pertain more to the real world. The innovation of this paper was to simultaneously take into account three indices in the new product/service development project network. Results show the project completion delay risk was lower when the network indices were further involved in the scheduling task. This, in turn, reduced the risks faced by the new product/service development projects during their completion in the shortest time possible.