MULTISPACE QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT FOR MODULARIZATION

Specialization and professionalization of design work make it difficult for members of a product development team to share product information with each other. Previously we proposed the Multispace Quality Function Deployment (M-QFD), which allows designers to extract design elements with respect to diverse requirements and to understand their relationships, on the basis of the Multispace Design Model and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM). This study improves M-QFD using the Design Structure Matrix (DSM). Benefits of the DSM include: 1) excluding indirect relationships, which prevents generating one huge chunk of design elements, 2) incorporating designers' opinions, and 3) considering several types of the relationships. The improved M-QFD enables modular composition of product components to be constructed in the late process of design. Additionally, a design example (design of an automotive steering system) is presented to demonstrate the improved M-QFD.