Re-engineering of the design process for concurrent engineering

According to the requirements of concurrent engineering, three interdepende ncy relationships (uncoupled relationship, coupled relationship and decoupl ed relationship) between design activities are presented in this paper. And the coupled relationship plays an important role in concurrent product des ign process. To represent the precedence relationships among design activit ies, a directed graph is used to describe the design process. And the inter dependency relationship between activities is illustrated by a Design Struc ture Matrix which is the transpose of the accessibility matrix of the corre sponding graph. Using the DSM, an algorithm of recognizing the coupled acti vities during the design process is presented. Moreover, an algorithm to fi gure out the order levels of activities during the design process is propos ed. And both algorithms are illustrated with a die design example. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.