Process planning for collaborative product development with CD-DSM in optoelectronic enterprises

Coupled activities are the main reasons to cause collaboration in product development (PD) process. Previous modeling approaches such as Petri net, IDEF and DSM fail to represent the collaboration characteristic of PD process well. Considering the characteristics of optoelectronic PD process especially for demand of collaborative development, this paper proposes the process planning framework, establishes the three-dimensional collaboration model, and analyzes nine collaboration types among activities. The Process Collaboration Degree (PCD) and Activity Collaboration Degree (ACD) considering information delivery times and probability are defined to strengthen the modeling ability of DSM, and then the Collaboration Degree Design Structure Matrix (CD-DSM) is constructed to model the collaborative development process of optoelectronic products. In order to decrease the coupled complexity, PCD is applied to decompose the nested activities into atomic activities based on the information input/output points and ACD is used to express the value of the elements in the CD-DSM. Furthermore, the upstream and downstream relationship of atomic activities is optimized based on the CD-DSM to plan the collaborative PD process. Finally, the proposed framework is realized in a prototype system, and an example of LED display module development process is carried out in an optoelectronic company to illustrate the application. And the results show that the proposed method improves the process planning of collaborative PD effectively. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.