Dependency analysis as a heat map for architecture standardization

Abstract

Heavy duty trucks are high variant products with a comparably small production volume per product family. A high degree of specialization regarding utilization scenarios and transportation tasks, as well as strong spreading of functional variability generate increasing numbers of offered variants. The continuous introduction of new legal, technical and customer requirements combined with long product life cycles as well as the need for prolonged technological backward compatibility causes a complexity problem. Architecture standardization is a key lever in reducing complexity by deliberately cutting the number of variants and defining stable interfaces. However, at this point standardization potentials do not seem to be fully exploited. This paper proposes an architecture standardization method using two approaches complementing product architecture development. First, a prescriptive approach predicts direct and indirect change propagation paths within a generic truck architecture, based on component dependencies. Secondly, a descriptive approach identifies geometrical conflicts in the product concept phase and facilitates the introduction of architectural standards, which in turn resolve these conflicts and decouples dependencies within the architecture. Applying these methods serves as a heat map that helps to identify the hot spots for potential standardization in product architectures. It is outlined and illustrated in two examples of change-related conflicts between physical components and product functionality.