Research on design structure matrix and its applications in product development and innovation: an overview

Firms rely on new product development to succeed in competitive global markets. Competition forces these firms to launch more innovation products in shorter periods of time. However, owing to complexity of product development and innovation, it is difficult to model product development process with traditional modelling tools, such as directed graph, Petri-Nets and so on. Design Structure Matrix (DSM) has attracted extensive attention among scholars due to its visual and compact matrix expression format. This paper first reviews four types of DSMs and their applications in engineering; and then, several algorithms (i.e. partitioning, tearing, banding, clustering) are introduced in brief; after that, the applications of DSM in concurrent engineering, virtual enterprise and other fields are introduced. In addition, hybrid model of four DSM types as well as numerical DSM (NDSM) and its applications are discussed. Finally, the limitations and expansions of DSM are made as the promising area for further research.