Modeling the Product Development Process as a Dynamic System with Feedback

The modeling of effective product development process can help manage the overall process efficiently and help organize a multifunctional team to develop products in a concurrent and cooperative manner. In this article, a product development process is viewed as a dynamic system with feedback based on the feedback control theory, and a dynamic system model and its design structure matrix are developed. The model and its design structure matrix can be further divided to capture the interaction and feedback of design information. A fuzzy evaluation method is presented for the evaluation of the performance of a dynamic development process; this allows a development process to be optimized based on re-organizing design constraints, re-organizing design processes, and re-organizing designer’s preferences. An example is provided to illustrate the proposed model.