Supporting Product Architecture Design

Research Theme: Process Management

This project concerns the design of product architectures - the conceptual structures underlying engineering artefacts. It involves both empirical research into how product architectures are designed in practice, and the development of support methods to facilitate product architecture design.

Motivation

The architecture of a product can have a significant bearing on the relationship between different aspects of its life-cycle performance (e.g. fulfilment of technical requirements, development cost, maintenance and upgrade etc.). However, since product architectures are qualitative rather than numerical in nature, their design can be challenging. Conventional design methods are frequently informal and can have limitations (e.g non-systematic exploration of possibilities, fixation on past designs). This project seeks to understand how product architecture design takes place in practice and, based on that understanding, to develop and evaluate a support method.

Objectives

  • Understand the context in which the architectures of engineering artefacts are designed, the objectives driving their design, and how their designs emerge.
  • Develop a support method for product architecture design, drawing on insights gained from studying design practice.
  • Evaluate the usability, applicability and usefulness of the support method.

Method

An understanding of industry practice has been gained through interviews with engineers at the main industrial partner. This will be tested through interviews at other engineering firms, to assess its generalisability.

In parallel, a design methodology for generating and evaluating product architectures, based around a software tool implemented within the CAM framework, has been developed based on insights from practice. This is currently being evaluated, both in a laboratory setting within the research group and through application to problems of interest to the industrial partner.

Acknowledgements

Support for this project is provided by the George and Lilian Schiff Studentship.

Selected Publications

  • WYATT, D.F., WYNN, D.C. and CLARKSON, P.J. (2009) 'A computational method to support product architecture design', ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE'09), Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA
  • WYATT, D.F., ECKERT, C.M. and CLARKSON, P.J. (2009) 'Design of product architectures in incrementally developed complex products', International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED'09), Stanford, CA, USA, 4, 167-178
  • ECKERT, C.M., WYATT, D.F. and CLARKSON, P.J. (2009) 'The elusive act of synthesis: creativity in the conceptual design of complex engineering products', ACM Creativity and Cognition 2009, Berkeley, California, USA
  • WYATT, D.F., WYNN, D.C. and CLARKSON, P.J. (2010) 'Characterising the impact of legacy architectures on complex products', 11th International Design Conference (DESIGN 2010), Dubrovnik, Croatia
  • WYATT, D.F., WYNN, D.C. and CLARKSON, P.J. (2009) 'Exploring spaces of system architectures using constraint-based classification and Euler diagrams', International Design Structure Matrix Conference (DSM'09), Greenville, South Carolina, USA