CLUSTERING METHOD OF DESIGN STRUCTURE MATRIX FOR TRADE-OFF RELATIONSHIPS

Due to the specialization and professionalization of design activities, sharing the product information between the members of a product development team has become important. In the previous study, we proposed M-QFD by applying the concept of Multi-space design model to QFD (quality function deployment) and the modularization method, which arranges the relationships between the diverse design elements extracted using M-QFD and modularizes (clusters) the product components. However, the clustering method has difficulty in deriving the adequate number of the clusters because the more types of the interactions become, the more the number of the trade-off relationships between the components included in a cluster. This paper presents the clustering method dealing the trade-off relationships between the product components. This method can support designers to integrate or decompose the components on the basis of the trade-off relationships. Moreover, this paper describes the illustrative example of the proposed method.