A DSM cladistics model for product family architecture design

Product variety is a life reality that has to be handled by designers and manufacturers in order to reap the benefits of economy of scope. Product modularity has been the key design solution to manage the increased variety. Design Structure Matrix (DSM) has become the favorable tool by designers to express product or system component relationships, which is used later to cluster components into modules that have strong relationships among their components. This paper is presenting a simple and efficient methodology for designing a product family architecture from a given product family. It is a variant-oriented DSM approach to augment different product design variants into a one collective DSM. Modularity is then performed using Cladistics, a hierarchical classification tool, which is extensively used in biology, and has been also successfully implemented in engineering in design and manufacturing. The results are cascaded layers of component modules representing the underlying product family architecture. A case study of a family of seven kettle variants has been used to represent this novel approach and verify the quality of the results.