Development projects scheduling and design structure matrix

Many researchers have highlighted weaknesses of traditional approaches, such as PERT and CPM, in scheduling product development projects and in particular their failure to model iteration. The design structure matrix (DSM) method provides a practical and useful tool to deal with this issue. The advantages of DSM representation and analysis techniques have led to their increasing use in project planning, and have spawn dozens of research efforts on organizing design tasks. This paper explores the nature of DSM approach, and reviews its recent development in design project scheduling. The paper also discusses limitations of existing DSM-based models, and proposes future research directions.