Abstract
Product development is a complicated activity which consists of a lot of tasks related with each other. Therefore, designing not only the product, but also the design process is very important. However, traditional project management or simulation tools are not suitable to deal with the complicated design process which includes coupled design tasks. In this paper, a new process simulation model is proposed based on DSM (Design Structure Matrix) and DiFS (Design Information Flow Simulation), in order to support the analysis and improvement of the design process. The proposed method can simulate the progress of the complicated design process in detail, and verify the effectiveness of process improvement strategies.
