Reducing Design Cycle Time and Cost Through Process Resequencing

Abstract

In today''s competitive environment, companies are under enormous pressure to reduce the time and cost of their design cycle. A software tool, the Design Manager''s Aid for Intelligent Decomposition (DeMAID), has been developed to aid the design manager in reducing the cost and time of the design cycle through understanding the sequence of design processes and the effects of iterative subcycles often found in complex design projects. Once these are understood, the design manager can make decisions that take advantage of decomposition, concurrent engineering, and parallel processing techniques. DeMAID is a knowledge-based software tool for minimizing the feedback couplings; sequencing the design processes; grouping processes into iterative subcycles; decomposing these subcycles into a hierarchical, multilevel structure for a design cycle; and displaying the sequence of processes in a design structure matrix format. Once the iterative subcycles have been determined, the real benefits of producing the best design in the least time and at a minimum cost are obtained from sequencing the processes within these subcycles. A genetic algorithm has been added to rapidly examine many possible sequence combinations. A sample conceptual design project shows how DeMAID can be applied to reduce the time and cost of the design cycle.

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