Design Complexity Evaluation Framework for Complex System Architecture

Abstract

As recent market and customers are demanding more functional requirements, safety, durability and connection with IT technology, modern engineered systems are becoming more complex. The increased complexity leads to more development cost and effort to meet the target performance and schedule. Thus system architects or engineers need to analyze the causes of systems complexity and determine how they can measure such complexity. This thesis focuses on a new complexity quantification measure for system architecture in the context of product development. Through literature reviews, a new complexity quantification measure, which is easily applicable by allocating requirements to components, is proposed. This measure utilizes the domain mapping matrix (DMM) and matrix energy. Through a case study using a vehicle steering system and expert interview, the proposed measure is shown to have a good correlation with design effort.