Automatic generation of design structure matrices through the evolution of product models

Abstract

Dealing with component interactions and dependencies remains a core and fundamental aspect of engineering, where conflicts and constraints are solved on an almost daily basis. Failure to consider these interactions and dependencies can lead to costly overruns, failure to meet requirements, and lengthy redesigns. Thus, the management and monitoring of these dependencies remains a crucial activity in engineering projects and is becoming ever more challenging with the increase in the number of components, component interactions, and component dependencies, in both a structural and a functional sense. For these reasons, tools and methods to support the identification and monitoring of component interactions and dependencies continues to be an active area of research. In particular, design structure matrices (DSMs) have been extensively applied to identify and visualize product and organizational architectures across a number of engineering disciplines. However, the process of generating these DSMs has primarily used surveys, structured interviews, and/or meetings with engineers. As a consequence, there is a high cost associated with engineers' time alongside the requirement to continually update the DSM structure as a product develops. It follows that the proposition of this paper is to investigate whether an automated and continuously evolving DSM can be generated by monitoring the changes in the digital models that represent the product. This includes models that are generated from computer-aided design, finite element analysis, and computational fluid dynamics systems. The paper shows that a DSM generated from the changes in the product models corroborates with the product architecture as defined by the engineers and results from previous DSM studies. In addition, further levels of product architecture dependency were also identified. A particular affordance of automatically generating DSMs is the ability to continually generate DSMs throughout the project. This paper demonstrates the opportunity for project managers to monitor emerging product dependencies alongside changes in modes of working between the engineers. The application of this technique could be used to support existing product life cycle change management solutions, cross-company product development, and small to medium enterprises who do not have a product life cycle management solution.

Engineering Project Health Management: A Computational Approach for Project Management Support Through Analytics of Digital Engineering Activity

“…This paper is based within the extensive field of design structure matrices [74], [75]. In the original work, the analysis is applied to a single car development project, consisting of 1432 files with 10,145 updates [76].…”

How participative is open source hardware? Insights from online repository mining

“…Few works have implemented the idea of repository mining in the field of mechanical engineering and design science, however while mining proprietary data sources. Gopsill et al (2016) used the versioning history of two student formula 1 development projects in order to identify design dependencies between subsystems. Using the temporal evolution of product CAD model editions, they were able to automatically deduct the design structure matrices (DSM) of these products, a critical information when it comes to managing product development processes.…”

“…An interaction between two project contributors is defined as the edition of a common file in the course of the project. The subsequent edition of the same file by two contributors is therefore considered in this article as the reference unit of observable collaboration, as in Gopsill et al (2016), Piccolo et al (2017) and partially in Menichinelli (2017). The versioning metadata delivered by the GitHub API is post-processed in order to produce file co-edition networks (as defined in Asri et al 2017).…”

The emergent structures in digital engineering work: what can we learn from dynamic DSMs of near-identical systems design projects?

“…To overcome the limitations of the current generation methods, researchers have begun to investigate how the output of engineering work can be used to elicit the connected nature of system components (Morkos, Shankar & Summers 2012;Senescu et al 2012;Gopsill et al 2016). Examples include the tracking of file exchanges between individuals (Senescu et al 2012), aggregation and processing of change request documents (Morkos et al 2012;Ghlich, Hildebrand & Schellert 2018) and the capture of file edit co-occurrences to build a probabilistic model of dependencies (Gopsill et al 2016). Each has the potential to provide a more automated, system agnostic, objective and real-time method that results in the generation of DSMs that are in line with the evolution of the project.…”