DESIGN PROCESS ELICITATION THROUGH THE EVALUATION OF INTEGRATED MODEL STRUCTURES

Refinement of product design processes is recognized as a means for organizations to impact lead times, cost, and quality. Although methods such as the design structure matrix (DSM) exist to analyze design processes, their applications have been limited by overhead in collecting data and maintaining accurate representations. Representation timeliness and resolution issues have typically led to static, high-level process views. In this work, the design process is derived dynamically from an evolving network of design resources inter-related by service dependencies. This network is created to simulate the state of a product design. Through the analysis of resulting dependencies, high-resolution networks of task and parameter interdependency can be extracted. A software module is developed to provide the service of automatically extracting and analyzing the structure of service exchanges in integrated design models. The module provides a matrix or DSM visualization of service relationships and mechanisms to sort resources according to service priority. This allows for realtime evaluation of design processes as models of the product evolve, providing information to guide the strategic addition of resources.