An Application-Specific Approach for Design Structure Matrix Optimization: Focusing on the Cross Application of Modularization and Sequencing Methods

Providing a structured approach for complex product development (PD) is a challenging issue that necessitates utilizing sophisticated modeling tools and analysis techniques. One effective approach for optimizing the complex engineering system development is the cross application of modularization and sequencing analyses on the design structure matrix (DSM), which leads to a cost-effective and time-efficient PD process. In this regard, the current study presents an application-specific method for the simultaneous implementation of modularization and sequencing analyses on DSMs to find the most independent and excluded modules with the minimum feedback loops among them. To this end, we first formulate the total feedback length among the modules by introducing two new modules’ feedback criteria. Second, we propose a novel objective function combining these feedback criteria with the modularity index metric to simultaneously fulfill the sequencing and modularization goals. This objective function makes the proposed method application specific in the sense that the expert is able to adjust the importance weight of each criterion based onthe project's characteristics. Third, an efficient metaheuristic algorithm named discrete particle swarm optimization simulated annealing (DPSOSA) is developed to find the optimal solution by minimizing the introduced objective function. Eventually, to evaluate the DPSOSA performance in different applications, we conduct comprehensive experiments on a total of 21 well-known real-world DSMs. The obtained results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over previous approaches proving its effectiveness in each of modularization, sequencing, and modularization-sequencing experiments.