Abstract:
The present invention relates generally to design and evaluation of research and development, technology transfer, and learning-by-doing, and more particularly to the determination of production plans and the prediction of innovation. A preferred embodiment comprises a method for determining a production plan comprising the steps of: defining a plurality of production recipes such that each of said production recipes is a vector of n operations; selecting a current one of the production recipes; evaluating the current production recipe to determine its cost; modifying the current production recipe to create a trial production recipe (130); evaluating the trial production recipe to determine its cost (140, 150); and assigning the trial production recipe to the current production recipe if the cost of the trial production recipe is less than the cost of the current production recipe.