Risks assessment in multidisciplinary project development based on OTSM-TRIZ and DSM

Multidisciplinary innovation projects offer several benefits during the ideation phase as well as during the technical development process, however, the increasing complexity in design process of multidisciplinary systems requires designers to collaborate and share knowledge within different disciplines. Consequently, the product development process (PDP) can be considered as a risk in project development when multidisciplinary teams are not properly integrated. Given this context, this article presents a method integration aiming to support the technical development, effective communication and early risk detection and mitigation in such projects by systematically forecasting and suggesting context-driven solutions to the potential risks. The proposed method is based on the integration of the general theory of powerful thinking and the theory of inventive problem solving (OTSM-TRIZ) and a cross-domain variant of the design structure matrix (DSM), due to its capability to evaluate interactions and propagability between tasks and characteristic of the organizations such as skills or disciplines required. More specifically, a network of problems (NoP) is created to propose several partial solutions while considering future problems in the task planning, a cross-domain DSM ease the identification of high-risk multidisciplinary tasks and finally TRIZ principles provide suitable solutions to mitigate potential communication problems among multidisciplinary tasks. Finally, the effectiveness of the three-step procedure is evaluated through its implementation in a real multidisciplinary innovation project for smart wildland fire surveillance.