Technical Papers

IEEE Transactions On Engineering Management, Vol. 48, No. 3, August 2001
Systems engineering of products, processes, and organizations requires tools and techniques for system decomposition and integration. A design structure matrix (DSM) provides a simple, compact, and visual representation of a complex system that supports innovative solutions to decomposition and integration problems. The advantages of DSMs vis-à-vis alternative system representation and analysis techniques have led to their increasing use in a variety of contexts, including product development, project planning, project management, systems engineering, and organization design. This paper reviews two types of DSMs, static and time-based DSMs, and four DSM applications: 1) Component-Based or Architecture DSM, useful for modeling system component relationships and facilitating appropriate architectural decomposition strategies; 2) Team-Based or Organization DSM, beneficial for designing integrated organization structures that account for team interactions; 3) Activity-Based or Schedule DSM, advantageous for modeling the information flow among process activities; and 4) Parameter-Based (or low-level schedule) DSM, effective for integrating low-level design processes based on physical design parameter relationships. A discussion of each application is accompanied by an industrial example. The review leads to conclusions regarding the benefits of DSMs in practice and barriers to their use. The paper also discusses research directions and new DSM applications, both of which may be approached with a perspective on the four types of DSMs and their relationships.

Proceedings of the First World Conference on Integrated Design and Process Technology (IDPT-Vol. 1), Society for Design and Process Science, Austin, TX, pp. 103-111, December 7-9, 1995.
Researchers and practitioners worldwide have recognized the importance of structured, scientificallybased, and industrially-tested theories and methods for product (and process) design and development. Recent research has sought similar goals: reduced development time, reduced product costs, and increased value delivered to customers. However, American and European research in engineering design and product development have evolved differently and are distinct in their scope of application. Consequently, little integration and cross-learning have been done. In this paper we propose a categorization of design research approaches2 based on evolution and scope. We use this categorization to explain the reasons for lack of integration of design research. We distinguish between the process of creating a knowledgebase of design (the objective of design research in academia) and the process of selecting and implementing such knowledge (the objective of product development in industry). Finally we propose a process for identifying synergies and conflicts in the use of multiple design theories and methods.

3rd CIRP Workshop on Design and the Implementation of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Tokyo, Japan, pp. 77-84, June 19-21, 1996.
This paper discusses the advances of axiomatic design, both as a design approach in industry and as a research field. It is demonstrated that the growth is based on industrial practice and a vision of design theory. The information presented in this paper is based on experience from implementation of axiomatic design in industry in Asia, the USA, and Europe. Specifically, this paper presents strategic implications of implementing a new design method within a company, two generic implementation approaches, risks and benefits of each approach based on actual implementation cases, and some examples of products developed by industry by using axiomatic design. The paper also points out the importance of continued teaching and research in the area of axiomatic design. It outlines a typical course for industry given at MIT and presents issues for future research.

Proceedings of the Second World Conference on Integrated Design and Process Technology (IDPT-Vol. 3), Society for Design and Process Science, Austin, TX, pp. 97-104, Dec. 1-4, 1996.
The contribution of this paper is a new tool for modeling product development processes. Currently there are two types of process models: ones that are so broad that they describe the activities of any designer but provide no assistance, and ones that are so restrictive that they cannot be an accurate description of actual design practice. The challenge is to create a general model from which the designer can structure a specific implementation of the design process. The general model must be flexible to cover all instances of the design process, yet it must contain enough specifics to be useful in guiding the designer. This apparent contradiction was solved by segmenting the design process into generic activities, with explicit relationships between them, from which the designer can structure a unique design process. Moreover, the activities are specific enough to support the designer in selecting design tools and methods for each activity, to identify clearly decision points, and to create a good information infrastructure for the process. The paper contains an overview and an analysis of existing design process models, a new proposed tool for modeling product development processes, and detailed descriptions of the activities in this model.

University of Idaho/Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2005.
Helping undergraduate engineering students learn effective design practices that are applicable to the modern workplace is one of the most complex challenges of engineering education. One strategy to help students master open-ended design projects is to use a systematic process. However, students often want to jump past the front end of the design process and this compromises the quality of the final product. This paper examines the suitability of Axiomatic Design in addressing this problem. Central to Axiomatic Design is early identification of uncoupled design parameters that address independent functional requirements. A new design process, incorporating Axiomatic Design methods along with the use of Acclaro software (http://www.dfss-software.com) was developed in this work and piloted with several capstone design teams at the University of Idaho during the current academic year. Early indications are that these teams were more successful in establishing functional requirements that were more complete, more logically hierarchical, and more independent than other design teams. Furthermore, design ideas discussed by these teams seemed to be accepted or rejected on their own technical merits, rather than the force of the personalities of students who presented them. Thus, we have concluded that axiomatic design helps capstone teams produce higher quality design projects.

Pennsylvania State University
This article investigates the use of TRIZ and Axiomatic Design to solve the problem of poor acoustics in the historic Schwab Auditorium on the Penn State University Park campus. The problem is dissected to its functional requirements and the design parameters which govern the requirements. TRIZ and Axiomatic Design are then used to create an uncoupled design which solves all the functional requirements with one design parameter each. Finally there is a suggestion on how to combine all of the solutions to solve the poor acoustic problem in Schwab Auditorium.

Software is playing an increasingly important role in manufacturing. Many manufacturing firms have problems with software development. Software engineering is still labor-intensive and prone to errors. Industrial firms are under pressure to shorten the lead-time required in introducing new software, increase the reliability of their software, and increase their market share. Software must be designed correctly from the beginning to end. With this end in mind, axiomatic design theory has been applied to software design. This paper presents how the combination of axiomatic design has been combined with the object-oriented programming method to create a large software system.

Proceedings of the 1999 International CIRP Design Seminar, Enschede, the Netherlands, March 24-26, 1999.
To facilitate the design of evolving systems, tools are needed to capture all performance issues and evaluate design ideas and proposals quickly during the conceptual stage, so that better designs can be generated. By using such tools, engineers can quickly identify and understand how their design decisions impact and are impacted by choices made concerning other components in the system. Thus, rational design decisions will be made during conceptual design, minimizing if not eliminating the need to address design problems during implementation.

International Journal of Production Research, 2000.
Systematic design and evaluation of segmented production system structures is subject of this paper. Recently emerged paradigms of Lean Management and Business Process Reengineering call for adaptation of production system’s organizational structure to be more reactive to a volatile and diversified market behavior. One opportunity to optimize production system design is segmentation of the manufacturing enterprise into small, flexible and decentralized production units. The presented segmentation procedure utilizes an Axiomatic Design framework and supports Lean Management practices following strategic, organizational, and technological design aspects. A case study exemplifies the developed methodology to improve competitiveness of a manufacturing company.

International Conference “MECHANIKA 2001”. Kaunas, Lithuania. April, 2001.
The field of design, be it dedicated to products, processes or organizations, has undergone and is still undergoing an intellectual renaissance – from the still prevailing notion that design can be learned only from experience, to the idea that it may be amenable to a systematic and scientific treatment. Although these design activities in different fields seem to be distinct, cognitive processes and design principles are used in all fields, thus existing many ways to approach it. The axiomatic approach is one of them, and it gives a general theoretical structure, common to all fields. In the product development process adopted, the design activity is defined as having four phases: informational, conceptual, embodiment and detailed design. Among them, the two earliest phases are detached, where the decision taken has a broaden effect on the product’s success or failure. In this sense, as an aid to the development of these two design phases, is been developed at the Group of Integrated Product Development at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), researches aiming to determine methods and tools to aid the product development. The overall goal of this work is to study the axiomatic approach to design with emphasis on the decision-making process and to contribute to the product conceptual design informatization, registering the relations between functions and solutions. Through the identification of these relations it is intended to reduce the function-solution dependence. The greater the independence, the better the project, according to the axiomatic approach. Therefore, the research to be performed aims to determine how the axiomatic approach and its computational implementation may contribute to the product conceptual design phase.

Ford Motor Company, 2004 SAE World Congress, Detroit, Michigan, March 8-11, 2004
Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a systematic process and a disciplined problem prevention approach to achieve business excellence. Robust design is the heart of DFSS. To enable the success of robust parameter design, one should start with good design concept. Axiomatic Design, a fundamental set of principles that determine good design practice, can help to facilitate a project team to accelerate the generation of good design concept. Axiomatic Design holds that uncoupled designs are to be preferred over coupled design. Although uncoupled designs are not always possible, application of axiomatic design principles in DFSS presents an approach to help DFSS team focus on functional requirements to achieve design intents and maximize product reliability. As a result of the application of axiomatic design followed by parameter design, the DFSS team achieved design robustness and reliability. A hydraulic lash adjuster case study will be presented.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Engineering Design and Automation, Vancouver, B. C. Canada. August 1-4, 1999.
Today’s increasingly complex electromechanical systems require extensive use of software control to achieve necessary functionality. However, software design efforts for complex systems tend to be made only after most, if not all, of the hardware has been defined. As a result, the software often bears the burden of achieving the system’s desired functionality. While software is more flexible than hardware, the software design can often be greatly simplified with minor changes to the hardware design, if the software and hardware designs are done concurrently. Such unnecessary software complexity can have detrimental effects on the system in terms of safety and reliability under unusual operating conditions, as well as complicating upgrades and product redesigns. This paper proposes a methodology, based upon Axiomatic Design, for facilitating the design of software control systems in conjunction with their corresponding hardware systems. In the Axiomatic Design framework, a system is defined in a hierarchical structure known as a system architecture, where the specifications for the command and control logic, which is typically implemented in software, appear at each level of the design hierarchy. Thus, the design of the system software is distributed throughout the design of the system hardware. To apply this technique, programming terms are defined and their roles are explored in the Axiomatic Design framework. Next, a template is developed that represents system software and serves to highlight the functionality required to control and coordinate the various activities of the system hardware. A case-study example of a robot calibration routine is examined to illustrate these methods.

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Engineering Design and Automation, Maui, HI. August 9-12, 1998.
This paper describes how system command and control may be integrated into a system architecture. There are two key questions addressed: First, how does command and control fit within the decomposition- on which branches and at what levels are its functional requirements (FRs) and design parameters (DPs)? Second, what are the functions of command and control algorithms at different levels of the design hierarchy- what are their inputs and outputs? Our conclusions illustrate that the decisions about hardware components are made as part of the processes to which they belong; thus, the hardware components (DPs) that are controlled are distributed among several branches of the design hierarchy. Additionally, each module within a process has local software algorithms associated with it for its control. At higher levels of the design hierarchy, there are other algorithms responsible for coordinating the modules below it. Thus, software control algorithms exist at multiple levels of the design hierarchy. By properly structuring the design hierarchy in this fashion, design choices can be made about system command and control in a non-iterative manner and remain consistent throughout multiple levels of the design hierarchy.

Marmara University Working Paper, MIT Ecommerce Research Forum, Volume 2, Issue 7, November 2001
Electronic commerce is dramatically changing the traditional way of doing business and furthermore, the growth of the Internet is creating new business opportunities. Today many products, processes and organizations are complex systems that have to be designed in order to meet specific customer requirements. Axiomatic design is a scientifically based design theory that guides designers through the process of first mapping customer needs into functional requirements, then mapping these requirements into design parameters, and then finally figuring out processes to provide those design parameters. Once the created strategies from high-level goals down to the specific area of interest are mapped with axiomatic design, it is easy to follow an optimization of the implementation process. Axiomatic design can also be defined as a theory that provides designers with decision making criteria for the entire design process.

M.S. Dissertation, Texas Tech University, Dec. 2005.
In this research, different design methodologies and system/product development lifecycle models are studied. A new product development lifecycle model, the Axiomatic Product Development Lifecycle (APDL) model, with a robust structure to develop and capture the development lifecycle knowledge, is proposed and its use is discussed. The proposed approach is based on the AD method developed by Suh (1991); hence it inherits the benefits of applying the Axiomatic Design to product development. The Axiomatic Design method, in this research, is extended to cover the whole product development lifecycle including the test domain and new domain characteristic vectors are introduced such as the input constraint and system component vectors. The APDL model also provides more guidance than the AD method during the customer need mapping and during the design decomposition process.

The 1996 CIRP General Assembly in Como, Italy, August 25-31, 1996. (CIRP Annals, Vol. 45/1)
A software tool based on axiomatic design is being developed. Axiomatic Design (AD) provides a framework to describe design objects and a set of axioms to evaluate relations between intended functions (FR’s) and means by which they are achieved (DPs). AD analysis can be performed for engineering change orders (ECO) and field support systems with the capability for organizational learning. The software effort attempts to enhance the engineering CAD environment through the documentation of design rational based on AD and the implementation of AD matrices to evaluate design decisions and provide the proper development sequence.

MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA, September, 2006.
To efficiently design safety-critical systems such as nuclear power plants, with the requirement of high reliability, methodologies allowing for rigorous interactions between the synthesis and analysis processes have been proposed. This paper attempts to develop a reliability-centered design framework through an interactive process between Axiomatic Design (AD) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). Integrating AD and FTA into a single framework appears to be a viable solution, as they compliment each other with their unique advantages. AD provides a systematic synthesis tool while FTA is commonly used as a safety analysis tool. These methodologies build a design process that is less subjective, and they enable designers to develop insights that lead to solutions with improved reliability. Due to the nature of the two methodologies, the information involved in each process is complementary: a success tree versus a fault tree. Thus, at each step a system using AD is synthesized, and its reliability is then quantified using the FT derived from the AD synthesis process. The converted FT provides an opportunity to examine the completeness of the outcome from the synthesis process. This study presents an example of the design of a Containment Heat Removal System (CHRS). A case study illustrates the process of designing the CHRS with an interactive design framework focusing on the conversion of the AD process to FTA.

Center for Quality of Management Journal, Vol 7., No. 2, Winter 1998
This paper will explore aspects of the work of a Chrysler Corporation team that set out to design a new-vehicle assembly plant for a lean production system. From May until December of 1996 I was working at Chrysler in Detroit, Michigan as an intern under MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing program; and I had the opportunity to be part of this design effort. The paper will illustrate the development of an integrated management system, and I will extract from the case generic lessons for organizations to consider when designing other integrated management systems.

Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry, November 2006
Using recognized methodologies to develop design control procedures can ensure compliance and lead to business excellence.

Nov. 2000.
One of the most important tasks in robust design is to select an appropriate system output response in the study. The quality of this selection will greatly affect the effectiveness of the robust design project. Currently, this selection process is more like art than science. By using TRIZ and Axiomatic Design principle, several new approaches to enhance robust design are developed. These approaches enable us to select the appropriate system output response in a systematic fashion. The approach described in this paper was successfully applied and verified in a case study in a large automotive company.

Nov. 2000.
This paper describes how to use the framework of Axiomatic Design to identify a proper system output response and bridge the gap between the conceptual design and the parameter design to facilitate the upfront robustness thinking, which is an extension to the methodology, presented in Part I. Part II builds upon the rationale presented in Part I for the proper identification of system output response in a more complex technical system. It could be, for instance, be a design review process to investigate how a design concept may be optimized to desensitize the side effects of noise factors. It is shown that using bottom-up approach based on axiomatic design bridges the gap between conceptual design and parameter design. By applying the method in Part II, engineer gains deeper insight of design concept structure and the physical effects of the corresponding design parameters.

Proceedings of DETC 2001: ASME 2001 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, September 9-12, 2001, Pittsburgh, PA
This paper presents a technique to obtain a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) from a Design Matrix (DM). This technique enables us to obtain the design information flow pattern at early stage of the design, and apply the DSM system analysis and management techniques at the time when the most important decisions about the system and the design are made. The validity of this method is proven using a case study on the design integration process of an electrostatic chuck used in semiconductor wafer processing. The algorithm underlying this technique is also proven logically and mathematically to be valid.

Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development, MIT, Cambridge, MA, November 1996.
This paper introduces the use of axiomatic design in the design of manufacturing systems. The two primary functional requirements of any manufacturing system are developed. These functional requirements are used to analyze the design of four manufacturing systems in terms of system performance. The purpose of this work is to provide a new foundation for describing, determining and rationalizing the design of any new manufacturing system.

Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development, MIT, Cambridge, MA, November 1996.
The design and evaluation of manufacturing system design is the subject of this paper. Though much attention has been given to the design of manufacturing systems, in practice most efforts still remain empirically-based. Numerous idioms have been used in the attempt to describe the operation of manufacturing systems. When a company tries to become “lean” or wants to increase the production and become more efficient, the company will start to introduce numerous concepts developed by Toyota and others. The problem is that a company does not know the order in which to implement the lean changes or why they should implement what they are implementing. This approach greatly slows manufacturing improvements when complementary or contradictive concepts are introduced on an ad-hoc basis. In this paper, a sequence of implementation steps will be developed through the application of axiomatic design. This sequence will provide a design methodology for lean production which connects manufacturing system design objectives to operation design parameters. This paper will use the methodology developed to improve manufacturing processes in two different companies.

White Paper. Last revision: April 22, 1999.
This document provides the standard templates for system architecture tables, along with complete descriptions, for hardware systems3. The following template should be used when applying Axiomatic Design (AD) to a system design project. This template is intended to provide a consistent format for the system architecture (SA), which can be used as a standard format for representation and design reviews.

Integrated Design and Process Technology, IDPT-2006, June 2006.
Component Oriented Software Engineering (COSE) tools generally deal with the composition of components using their interfaces. They operate at the level of component’s interface and connect components by limited semantic guidance. These COSE approaches suffer from lack of standards and systematic documentation of component properties. A component interface is not detailed enough to define all interface items and relationships among them. However, Axiomatic Design matrix (AD) includes interface items and Functional Requirements (FRs). In this study, AD matrix notation is utilized for satisfying FRs defining interface items.

Thesis, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, Nov 1996.
The purpose of thesis is to initiate the effort to establish the information infrastructure for axiomatic design [SUH90]. The work is primarily focused on answering the following questions: What are sources of information that the designer can use during the axiomatic design process? How can information obtained during the design process be of benefit during later stages of the design object’s life cycle? A new information framework was developed to answer the first question, and an extension of the theory presented by Suh in [SUH90] was developed to answer the second question. It was shown that this framework applies not only to engineering problems, but also to problems outside the field of engineering. Furthermore, the framework and theory that was developed can most likely be fully implemented in a computerized information system. Based on the information framework, it was demonstrated how other design methods (such as Altshuller’s theory of inventive problem solving [ALTS88]) can be used to enhance the designers performance within the framework.

Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 1999.
Many design theories lack scalability to systems with many elements. They provide guidance to designers about specific facets of a design task but are too cumbersome to apply thoroughly from conceptual to detailed design. Thus the opportunity for rational design is missed. Axiomatic design (AD) seems ideal for directing the design of large systems because it proposes general principles and a recursive design process. AD provides a fundamental basis for understanding decision making during design. It contains representations for the design object (a hierarchy of functional requirements, design parameters, and design matrices) and the design process (decomposition and zigzagging) combined with rules for decision making (the independence and information axioms). Challenges remain, however, in implementing the theory to large system designs.