Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications

Design structure matrix (DSM) is a straightforward and flexible modeling technique that can be used for designing, developing, and managing complex systems. DSM offers network modeling tools that represent the elements of a system and their interactions, thereby highlighting the system’s architecture (or designed structure). Its advantages include compact format, visual nature, intuitive representation, powerful analytical capacity, and flexibility. Used primarily so far in the area of engineering management, DSM is increasingly being applied to complex issues in health care management, financial systems, public policy, natural sciences, and social systems. This book offers a clear and concise explanation of DSM methods for practitioners and researchers. The book’s four sections correspond to the four primary types of DSM models, offering tools for representing product architectures, organization architectures, process architectures, and multidomain architectures (which combine different types of DSM models to represent multiple domains simultaneously). In each section, a chapter introducing the technique is followed by a chapter of examples showing a variety of applications of that DSM type. The forty-four applications represent a wide range of industries (including automotive, aerospace, electronics, building, and pharmaceutical), countries (among them Australia, Germany, Japan, Turkey, and the United State), and problems addressed (modularity, outsourcing, system integration, knowledge management, and others).