A Framework for Complex Product Architecture Analysis using an Integrated Approach

Abstract

Contemporary design decomposition and synthesis analytical tasks at the conceptual design stage reply on functional and structural modelling approaches. There is a wide diversity of elements used by various modelling approaches for information and representation of product architecture, which incurs difficulties for multidisciplinary engineers working across different phases of design in capturing, visualising, sharing and tracing consistent yet common knowledge and elements across the function and structure domains. This prompts for fixation of detail and common modelling knowledge across both functional and structural analytical approaches which is also critical from automatized software perspective. A limitation of existing approaches is that they tend to focus more on ‘what’ and less on ‘how’ (and vice versa). This paper proposes an integrated conceptual product architecting approach that combines and expands the functional and structural modelling approaches, enabling capturing and tracing knowledge coherently through a common binding domain. This is underpinned by the view that most interaction requirements amongst the physical components during structural modelling can be derived from functional modelling. The proposed integrated approach is underpinned by the critical analysis and synthesis of existing approaches in literature dealing with functional and structural architecture analysis, integrated within a Multiple Domain Matrix (MDM) to fuse the knowledge of both solution independent (functional) and dependent (structural) analyses. The proposed framework is illustrated with a case study of solar robot toy, followed by discussion and suggestions for future work.