Traditionally, product development has been considered to be a task-based process. More recently, the concept of Decision-Based Design (DBD) has been proposed, in which the product development process is considered a series of decisions rather than a series of tasks. In this work, the early stages of the vehicle development process have been modeled as a task-based process, using a Design Structure Matrix (DSM), and then interpreted in the context of the principles of formal decision analysis and DBD. Examination of the DSM model and observation of practicing vehicle development teams supports the notion that the vehicle development process is...