Functional structure based change assessment in product design

DSM 2012 Proceedings of the 14th International DSM Conference, Kyoto, Japan

Year: 2012
Editor: Onishi, M.; Maurer, M.; Kirner, K.; Lindemann, U.
Author: Oizumi, K.; Aoyama, K.
Series: DSM
Institution: The University of Tokyo, Japan
Section: System Architectures
Page(s): 167-180
ISBN: 978-3-446-43354-0

Abstract

Product development projects often face change requests while the project is still going on. To decide whether to accept these changes, not only the outcome expected to obtain by fulfilling changes, but also impacts on the project that caused by change need to be evaluated. However, if a product is so complex that changes may cause complementary changes, it is quite difficult to predict how the project is impacted. This paper proposes a model based assessment method of change propagation in terms of functional structure. In this paper, functional structure means how functional metrics are improved by changing design parameters, which can be depicted as Quality Function Deployment (QFD). By analysing relationships among functional metrics and design parameters, how change request on a certain functional metric propagates change effects to other functional metrics, and thus causes complementary changes are deduced in a form of DSM.

Keywords: Design change assessment, change propagation, Dependency Structure Matrix