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Coordination among many interdependent actors is key activity in complex product development projects. The challenge is made more difficult in concurrent engineering processes, as more activities happen in parallel and interact. This coordination becomes progressively more difficult with project size. We do not yet sufficiently understand whether this effect can be controlled with frequent and rich communication among project members, or whether it is inevitable. Recent work in complexity theory suggests that a project might form a “rugged landscape”, for which performance deterioration with system size is inevitable.

This article builds a mathematical model of a complex concurrent design project. The model explicitly represents local component decisions, as well as component interactions in determining system performance. The model …