Strategic planning of new product introductions in the automotive industry

The timing of the introduction of new vehicles is an important strategic concern in the automotive industry and a complex decision problem for a variety of reasons. First, due to the use of platform-based planning, shared modules create many interactions between the individual products. Secondly, new product development projects rely on various shared resources. Furthermore, many potentially conflicting objectives must be considered in such a long-term planning problem. We are addressing this problem by presenting a mixed-integer linear programming model for the timing of the introduction of new vehicles, which is building on modelling concepts of multi-project scheduling. Using data from a major German automotive company, we are presenting the computational performance of our model, when solved with state-of-the art solvers, as well as managerial insights.