Automatic design structure matrices: A comparison of two formula student projects

James Gopsill, Chris Snider, Emmanual Lia, Sian Joel Edgar, Ben Hicks

Research output: Chapter in Book/Published conference outputConference publication

Abstract

Design Structure Matrices have become a fundamental tool to support engineers in their handling and management of interactions across product & organisational architectures. Recent work in the field has exploited the opportunity afforded by Product Lifecycle Management systems, which capture the digital footprint of engineering projects to generate Design Structure Matrices in real-time through the co-occurrence of edits to product models. Given the systematic and more objective nature of the generation of these DSMs as well as being able to monitor their evolution throughout engineering projects, there now lies an opportunity in comparing projects/products using DSMs. To investigate this and the potential insights that could be generated, this paper presents the automatic generation of DSMs for two Formula Student projects. These have then been compared with respect to the end-of-project, change propagation characteristics and evolution of the DSMs. From this analysis, six insights have been generated that map the characteristics of the DSMs to the performance of the project/product and highlights the potential of automatic DSMs to further support engineering project management.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 17)
Subtitle of host publicationVol 6: Design Information and Knowledge
Pages31-40
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-904670-94-0
Publication statusPublished - 25 Aug 2017
Event21st International Conference on Engineering Design: (ICED 17) - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: 21 Aug 201725 Aug 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED17)
ISSN (Electronic)2220-4342

Conference

Conference21st International Conference on Engineering Design
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period21/08/1725/08/17

Bibliographical note

© 2017 The Authors

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