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

James Gopsill*, Chris Snider, Lia Emanuel, Sian Joel-Edgar, Ben Hicks

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference Contribution (Conference Proceeding)

1 Citation (Scopus)

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 cooccurrence 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 International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED
Pages31-40
Number of pages10
Volume6
EditionDS87-6
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED
ISSN (Print)2220-4334

Keywords

  • Computer Aided Design (CAD)
  • Design management
  • Design Structure Matrices
  • Product architecture
  • Project management

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Automatic design structure matrices: A comparison of two formula student projects'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this