Application of Critical Chain Project Management in Multiproject Environments in the Automotive Industry: A Discrete Event Simulation-Based Approach

• Grant number: 25/00420-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Production Engineering - Production Management
• Principal Investigator: João Victor Rojas Luiz
• Grantee: Juan Henrique Moser
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Engenharia (FE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Markets are increasingly threatened by uncertainties. The rapid technological evolution, high competition, and growing demands for personalization put pressure on organizations. In this context, agility in Product Development (PD) plays an essential role in the survival and success of organizations. However, most organizations struggle to manage their projects, mainly because they frequently conduct multiple projects simultaneously without using effective Project Management (PM) methodologies for multi-project environments, forcing them to make scope changes, extend deadlines, and increase budgets. Given this, Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) offers solutions for the planning and control of schedules for one or more projects, adequately dealing with scarce resources, multitasking, and behavioral factors, while proposing concepts such as buffers and project freezing. Nevertheless, the impact of CCPM on schedule performance and resource utilization remains underexplored in the literature. Thus, the proposal of this study is to evaluate the impact of CCPM schedule planning and control on performance metrics, focusing on multi-project environments. To this end, it is intended to use real data collected from an automotive industry to develop a computational model through which project execution simulations will be conducted using the CCPM method. This research is expected to provide evidence of the potential utility of the CCPM methodology in complex multi-project environments.