Enhancing Axiomatic Design with Design Structure Matrix

Abstract

Axiomatic design (AD) is a popular creative design method, which provides a systematic and scientific basis for making design solutions. The AD method is concentrated on how to find suitable design parameters to meet the needs of functional requirements, while certain system interaction factors and constraints (such as physical connectivity) are not catered directly. As a structured modeling method, more recently the design structure matrix (DSM) model has been regarded as a good roadmap of system interactions. DSM is a good tool representing interactions among design objectives and facilitating analysis of these interactions. Based on the complementarities between AD and DSM, it is proposed to enhance the AD method with DSM. The underlying logic is transforming the AD's design matrix into corresponding DSM for system interaction evaluation, thereby improving the feasibility of AD result. A design example of friction drive conveyor is given to illustrate the proposed design method.

An Integration Matrix for Investigating the Impact of Design Changes in Mechatronic Products

“…Intelligent decomposition or partitioning is essential to managing system complexity [19]. The system interaction must be captured and analyzed as early as feasible for project management and recommendations, in order to establish a design and development process that produces high-quality goods better, quicker, and with lower costs, as suggested by [17]. However, AD cannot explain the system interactions for system integration, despite its strength in functional decomposition and mapping.…”

“…Consequently, studies on EC management for complex en ing domains [2,5,24] have proposed a design structure matrix and network rep tion to preserve the constraints between nongeometric characteristics. Both tech however, exclude ECs as a change propagation pathway for consistency maintena As mentioned above, the authors [17,22] proposed a transformation of the DSM that can be described as the following steps:…”

“…Such a conversi cedure is illustrated by the straightforward example in Figure 4. Furthermore, the authors in [17,22] proposed that the DSM can assist in capturing the interactions between system elements. Similarly, the DSM is used to rebuild a process utilizing an integration matrix (I-DSM) that connects three layers (management, mechanical features, and control).…”

“…As mentioned above, the authors [17,22] proposed a transformation of the DM to DSM that can be described as the following steps:…”

“…From the design matrix, each layer was transformed to obtain the design structure matrix. Tang [17] advocated for the use of DSM to improve AD in this regard.…”