| Abstract |
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A lot of members from various disciplines are involved in the development of complex products, and this brings about large-scale, complicated cooperation among them. Such cooperation causes the following problems: the time consumption for achieving a consensus among them increases; and the management of product development becomes difficult. In order to develop the products efficiently, this paper proposes a method for dividing the product development activity into several work groups on an appropriate scale, in each of which some of the members can cooperate with each other without the problems mentioned above. In this method, the product development activity is represented by a directed graph, each of which nodes expresses a task and each of which arcs expresses the flow of data/information between the tasks. ISM (Interpretive Structural Modeling) identifies strongly connected sub-graphs, in each of which the members should cooperate with each other. However, if a strongly connected sub-graph is large, the problems mentioned above still exist. In this case, we use Bottleneck Method to divide the sub-graph into several smaller sub-graphs, each of which corresponds to a work group. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by showing an example of constructing the work groups. |
