The concept of DSM AND ADT INTEGRATION in the PRODUCT DESIGN PROCESS

Abstract

In manufacturing, product design is often very complex and requires the participation of a large number of services and material resources. Managing these resources can be very costly in terms of time, risk and money. The use of well-known tools (e.g. PERT, CPM and Gantt) alone cannot establish a detailed andoptimized planning in the execution of different stages and tasks of a project. To address this problem theDesign Structure Matrix (DSM) and the Axiomatic Design Theory (ADT) appear to be an interesting solution.This paper presents a DSM and ADT integrated tool as a part of the decomposition-integration problem inproduct design development process, where the latter is more concerned with mapping customer’s needs from functional requirements to design parameters, while the former is better suited to modelling the interactions and the integration of the design parameters. It also presents some algorithms related to both DSM and ADT used for manipulating projects-based DSM information, coordination and timing requirements, and provides a complementary between them. The discussion in this paper addresses the implementation of concurrent design engineering which is the greatest challenge faced by design managers.