6.3 Suspended Ceiling Design Process - Bilkent University

the list of performance factors that are proposed by the U.S. Construction
Specifications Institute (CSI) (Appendix A.2).
5.3.4 Dealing with Large DSM Models
One of the challenging problems in DSM models is presenting complex
systems with many interacting elements in the DSM format. When
constructing models comprised of hundreds of elements, the intuitiveness
provided by the DSM representation diminishes. It becomes increasingly
difficult to identify the relationships in a very large matrix so that the
method loses its advantage of simplicity.
DSMs with fewer than ten elements can often be analyzed via visual
inspection and manual manipulation. 50-100 element DSMs are legible on
a standard page. In order to decrease the complexity of larger DSMs and
to make them easier to review, one can aggregate some design
parameters under a generic name so that a series of DSMs with different
“resolutions” can be obtained. Of course, aggregation requires choices
about how to integrate elements to represent them as a single element
with minimal loss of information in the model (Browning, 2001).
In fact, the size of the DSM is dependent on the size of the design
problem. The experience of the author in building DSMs suggests that it is
advisable to define the problem in a manageable size for a parameter-
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