The design structure matrix (DSM), also called the dependency structure matrix, has become a widely used modeling framework across many areas of research and practice. The DSM brings advantages of simplicity and conciseness in representation, and, supported by appropriate analysis, can also highlight important patterns in system architectures (design structures), such as modules and cycles. A literature review in 2001 cited about 100 DSM papers; there have been over 1000 since. Thus, it is useful to survey the latest DSM extensions and innovations to help consolidate progress and identify promising opportunities for further research. This paper surveys the DSM literature, primarily from archival journals, and organizes the developments pertaining to building, displaying, analyzing, and applying product, process, and organization DSMs. It then addresses DSM applications in other domains, as well as recent developments with domain mapping matrices (DMMs) and multidomain matrices (MDMs). Overall, DSM methods are becoming more mainstream, especially in the areas of engineering design, engineering management, management/organization science, and systems engineering. Despite significant research contributions, however, DSM awareness seems to be spreading more slowly in the realm of project management.

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Design Structure Matrix Extensions and Innovations: A Survey and New Opportunities

Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit. For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work. Tradition and taboo dampen and control the rate of change in an unselfconscious culture's designs. It is important to understand that the individual person in an unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction. In the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of misconstruing the situation. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind - a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships - and this picture is almost always wrong. To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context - the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer. A designer who sets out to achieve an adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly. The designer's attempt is hardly as random as the child's is; but the difficulties are the same. His chances of success are small because the number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place is so enormous. The process of design, even when it has become selfconscious, remains a process of error-reduction. No complex system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time or effort unless the adaptation can proceed component by component, each component relatively independent of the others. The search for the right components, and the right way to build the form up from these components, is the greatest challenge faced by the modern, selfconscious designer. The culmination of the modern designer's task is to make every unit of design both a component and a system. As a component it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that are above it; as a system it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components of which it itself is made.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form. By Christopher Alexander. Pp. 191. 54s. 1964. (Harvard University Press.)

Benefits of modularity are often achieved from module independence that allows for independent development to reduce overall lead time and economies of scale due to sharing similar modules across products in a product family. Current modularity methods tend to describe only one of these views, either the module–module independence or the product–product shared module similarity. This paper proposes a new hybrid module generation algorithm that balances both module independence and product similarity, allowing product similarity strategy to influence the coupling-driven architecture considerations. The proposed method builds on two popular matrix-based methods: the design structure matrix approach and modular function deployment that each has been developed to support these two different aspects of the module generation. This paper presents a novel algorithm that integrates both views and allows a balanced clustering that takes both interactions and company portfolio strategy into account. Usefulness of the algorithm is presented using a cordless handheld vacuum cleaner as a case study and by comparing it to alternative approaches.

A module generation algorithm for product architecture based on component interactions and strategic drivers

Increased demand for a greater variety of products has forced many companies to rethink their strategies to offer more product variants without sacrificing production efficiency. In this context, research has found that such a trade-off can be properly managed by exploiting the module-based product family (MBPF) design. Over the years, active work in developing methods to design MBPFs has been carried out. Nevertheless, many of them have been created, and consequently exist, in isolation from one other. As a result, the adoption of these methods in industry and academy alike is inhibited by the seemingly broad array of material without a coherent organizing structure. To bridge this gap, this paper performs a systematic literature review and a meta-synthesis, wherein 72 methods to design MBPFs and their respective instances are connected in the form of a functional model and structured classes of design problems. These entities together serve as a meta-method for organizing the research on MBPF design, from which it was possible to identify the common underlying structure among the methods developed over the past 20 years. The main contributions of this work include: (1) constructing a functional model that connects the design methods for MBPFs; (2) suggesting structured classes of design problems that complement the functional model by cataloging the techniques meant to execute each sub-function of the model; (3) proposing a construction heuristic to build and assess functional models and classes of design problems.

Module-based product family design: systematic literature review and meta-synthesis

Modularity indices based on Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) have been utilised to help measure modularity and cluster a product’s architecture into independent or coordinated modules, but many metrics have difficulty (a) measuring the modularity of different types of architectures in real-world products such as bus-type architectures and (b) optimising module boundaries in architectures. After reviewing existing modularity indices and clustering algorithms, we introduce new modularity indices that can capture the degrees of (1) connection strengths within each independent module and between different modules, (2) density of connections within each module and between modules, (3) proximity of interactions to the diagonal of the DSM, and (4) density of connections between buses and other components. Moreover, the proposed metrics can serve as objective functions to obtain optimal DSMs to maximise modularity. A comparative analysis of the proposed modularity index shows that the proposed metric can ...

New modularity indices for modularity assessment and clustering of product architecture

For clustering a large Design Structure Matrix (DSM), computerized algorithms are necessary. A common algorithm by Thebeau uses stochastic hill-climbing to avoid local optima. The output of the alg ...

Improved Clustering Algorithm for Design Structure Matrix

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A module generation algorithm for product architecture based on component interactions and strategic drivers

Improved Clustering Algorithm for Design Structure Matrix