Architecture-centric design approach for multidisciplinary product development

Abstract

Managing complexity is a crucial task during the development process of multidisciplinary complex products. To achieve an efficient and effective development process of such a product, all the stakeholders must maintain a common understanding of the system and mutually linked detailed information of the product. This chapter proposes system architecture as a concept wider than product architecture, which provides such an overview as well as information that links various detailed information about the product. System architecture includes not only structural elements and relations among them but also functions, behaviors represented by working principles, and a variety of requirements. The working principles are modeled with physical phenomena and the involved parameters and relations among those parameters (e.g., equations). This chapter presents three prototype tools for system architecting illustrated with examples.