Applications Of Design Structure Matrix In Complex Product Development

Complex product design is always characterized by highly coupled, interdependent activities. Iteration is a fundamental aspect of complex product design as well as the major challenge in the reduction and the calculation of complex project duration and working hours. It is an effective way to reduce complex product development cycle time and to gain competitive advantage through process improvement using information flow process models. From the information flow perspective, each individual activity is an information processing unit that receives information from previous activities and transforms it into information suitable to be used by subsequent tasks. It is the information needs create dependencies between tasks that determine the project structure.But many of the traditional project management tools, such as Gantt chat and PERT can not describe the information flow from one activity to another. They also fail to deal with the problem of feedback and iteration. After researching the theory of iteration, the project management tools and design structure matrix (DSM). The method of DSM is able to provide a concise, clear, visual representation for the information relationships between every activity in one matrix. It is especially useful for highlighting iteration (feedback) and coupled activities in a design process, which will lay a solid foundation to address these issues. Therefore, the method of DSM is used to represent a design process according to characteristics of complex product development projects. Then this paper covered how the basic method works and how to use the DSM to improve the process of complex product development projects using partitioning, decoupling, increasing coupling, clustering algorithms. Finally, in order to obtain the total duration and working hours of the project, an improved parallel iteration model based on numerical DSM is introduced to calculate the duration and working hours of tasks in the coupled block using the method of linear algebra. The results provide an important basis for the schedule management and cost control of the project.It has been proved that the method of DSM is an effective tool in modeling the process of complex product development, reducing project cycle, dealing with the coupling problem and calculating of the project cycle, this paper offers some new thoughts for complex product development management.