Structural Design Exploration for Product Architecture Design

Abstract

This paper proposed a design support method based on structuralization and analysis of various design candidates of product architecture design. The product architecture is a basic scheme that assigns the function of the product to physical components. In the conventional modular design method, a concise model, i.e., a graph or a matrix, is used to express the interactions of the system’s components and aims to support the designer grasping the system behavior. The Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is a representative model of system architecture and enables quantitative evaluation of design candidates. While various design candidates are generated through mathematical operations, it is difficult to understand their relationships from simple comparisons because of discrete behavior and the size of the problem. It must be a critical issue at the stage of selecting and interpreting the design candidates. In the proposed method, the design candidates are classified and structuralized as a dendrogram by the hierarchical clustering method. The comparison of clusters of each branch of dendrogram clarifies the system leverage points. The information of the system is summarized into the hierarchical tree-shaped graph that corresponds to the dendrogram. The designer can explore the design candidates with such a graph-based based interpretation of underlying structures effectively.