Banding is the addition of alternating light and dark bands to a DSM to show independent (i.e. parallel or concurrent) activities (or system elements) (Grose, 1994). Banding is similar to partitioning the DSM using the Reachability
Matrix Method when the feedback marks are ignored (a band corresponds to a level).
The collection of bands or levels within a DSM constitute the critical path of the system/project. Furthermore, one element/activity within each band is the critical/bottleneck activity. Thus, fewer bands are preferred since they improve the concurrency of the system/project. For example, in the DSM shown below, tasks 4 and 5 do not depend on each other for information; therefore, they belong to the same band.
Example
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
1
2
X
X
3
X
X
4
X
X
5
X
X
X
X
X
X
6
X
X
7
X
X
8
X
X
9
X
X
X
X
10
X
X
X
X
X
11
X
X
X
X
12
X
X
X
X
X
13
X
X
X
14
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
Note that in the banding procedure, as described above, feedback marks
are not considered (i.e. they are ignored in the process of determing the
bands).
