Design Structure Matrix Flow for Improving Identification and Specification of Modules

Today’s customer wants products satisfying his/her own needs. In this growing mass customization market, two design techniques enable companies to answer this fairly new demand: (1) a platform-based approach, where a family of products share common components/modules, processes, etc. which constitute the common platform and then leveraged to satisfy each market niche and (2) a modular product approach, which enable reusing, swapping, and adapting modules with different features. This study focuses on the specification of modules, their architecture, and their interfaces. The Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is used and extended to represent more accurately the studied model. Thus, flow interactions between components and/or modules are added to the basic DSM to form the DSM_flow. This enhancement of the DSM with the flow interaction gives designers a clearer picture of the structure, components, and interactions of the design system. This extension improves existing proposed models by efficiently modeling flows and their states. Thus, this DSM_flow can be used for novel and incremental designs. To validate the method, a case study based on a family of refrigerators is performed.