Mapping in Design

The preceding chapters presented the basic concept of Axiomatic Design (AD). This chapter takes “MAPPING,” one of the important concepts of AD, to deeper understanding. Mapping between the functional and physical domains, and between the physical and process domains, accomplishes a number of important design tasks. First, it enables the designer to decompose functional requirements (FRs), design parameters (DPs), and process variables (PVs) to many branches and levels, in order to advance design solutions while maintaining independence and minimizing information content. Through proper mapping, designers can track the development of large projects. As the number of FRs and DPs increases with many levels and branches of decomposition, and as various participants do mapping, we need to capture the results of the mapping process by creating a master design and process matrices. This chapter also presents some additional hints regarding the best way to define the FRs.