Decomposition of interdependent task group for concurrent engineering

In concurrent engineering, project tasks generally involve the establishment of multifunctional teams in which team members from different functional departments interact in every phase of development tasks to design the products and processes concurrently. However, the increasing complexity of product development and design process often come up with large interdependent task groups due to the nature of the concurrent strategy. The large size of interdependent task groups makes it difficult for team organization and thus delays the project completion. This calls for the intention of this research to develop an effective model to: (1) transform the binary task relationships into the quantifiable task coupling strengths; and (2) to decompose the large interdependent task group into smaller and manageable sub-groups. Design structure matrix (DSM), analytic hierarchy process and cluster analysis are used to represent task relationships, quantify task couplings and decompose large size of task groups. Clustering performance between numerical DSM versus binary DSM is evaluated using a simulation experiment. The experimental results show that the clustering performance of using numerical DSM is better than the use of binary DSM. The effectiveness of this model is then demonstrated by an illustrative example. The result shows that our proposed model is capable of decomposing the large coupling task group that helps team organization for concurrent engineering project.