ABSTRACT
This chapter presents that the semantic relationship between modules' functional descriptions is correlated with the functional interaction between the modules. A deeper comprehension of the functional interactions between modules enables designers to integrate complex systems during the early stages of the product design process. The chapter reviews the formation of a module on the basis of functional interactions between modules. It examines the literature related to manual approaches for measuring functional interactions articulates the need for an automated methodology that analyzes these interactions. To search for functional interactions across textual data sets, the cosine measure has been employed using the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) results. A text mining technique may provide a more efficient means of quantifying functional interactions between modules when compared with a manually generated Design Structure Matrix (DSM) analysis, because the number of modules continues to increase along with their functional descriptions.
