Predicting and managing system interactions at early phase of the product development process

The activity of designing and developing large, complex, discrete, physical, and engineered products faces the challenges in the physical product system, the organization of people, and the larger systems in which the product resides-the natural and societal systems. This thesis defines system interactions as the interactions amongst design variables within the physical product. Knowing system interactions early in the product development process is critical for project management, design concept selection, and system architecture decisions. However, existing methods that address the system interactions issues, such as the Design Structure Matrix (DSM), are good analysis tools, but cannot be used during conceptual synthesis when the most important decisions about the system designs are made. System level knowledge is defined as the knowledge concerning system interactions. System level knowledge is organizational knowledge that resides in the collective minds of members in the organization. System level knowledge is critical to the success of the design of large systems, yet is often missing due to its empirical nature. A knowledge management framework was proposed in this thesis and tested in industry cases from Ford and CVC. This thesis developed a method to predict and analyze system interactions at early phase of the design process. The method transforms an Axiomatic Design's Design Matrix (DM) into a DSM based on solving systems of linear equations using substitution. Since a DM is more easily constructed during early design phases, we can use this method to obtain a DSM during concept design.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Dong, Qi, 1973-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daniel E. Whitney.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16881

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16881