FUNCTIONAL DECOMPOSITION AND MEREOLOGY IN ENGINEERING

Publisher Summary Functional descriptions in the engineering sciences have been analyzed in philosophy. The focus of these analyses has been on determining what is meant when an individual technical object or process is ascribed a function. Functional descriptions in the engineering sciences are, however, much richer than individual ascriptions of functions. Design methodologists often characterize the initial conceptual phase of engineering designing as one in which engineers reason from a required overall function of some product-to-be to a number of sub functions that can make up this overall function. In reverse engineering and other explanatory tasks, the reasoning may be the other way round, deriving an overall function from a series of sub functions. Moreover, in engineering knowledge bases, functional descriptions of technical objects, processes and their parts are related to one another. This functional reasoning in the engineering sciences leads to descriptions of technical systems in which different functions are related to one another. Functional reasoning leads in particular to functional decompositions, which are descriptions in which one overall function is related to a series of sub functions that, together, make up the overall function.