DSM-BASED METHODS TO REPRESENT SPECIALIZATION RELATIONSHIPS IN A CONCEPT FRAMEWORK

DSMs and related matrices are commonly used to represent system decomposition, structure, interaction and function/form assignment. But in conceptual design we must also represent specialization that relates a general thing and a type of that thing. In this paper we propose DSM-based methods to represent specialization relationships that occur in conceptual design. The research questions are: how can we encode in a DSM the information about specialization of a concept’s processes and instruments; and how it complements the existing approaches of representing the decomposition relationships. The fundamental utility of the proposed approach is that it facilitates the development of alternative concepts during the conceptual design phase blending the information about specialization and decomposition relationships in united framework. This work also proposes a measure of the formal conceptual similarity between alternative concepts.