Tradeoff between Modularity and Performance for Engineered Systems and Products

Modularity has become a pervasive theme in product development. Modular architecture, defined as having a one-to-one mapping from functional elements to the physical components of the product, or as “uncoupled design”, has many benefits from cost savings due to commonality to independent design of modules. However, a fully modular design may not always be achievable in designing engineering systems. In this paper, we show that technical constraints, such as light weighting, tight packaging and low power consumption, can drive designers towards more integral architectures. We quantify the degree of modularity by calculating three different modularity measures for two product pairs that represent business and technical constraint driven versions of the same product type. One of these metrics uses a singular value decomposition of the binary design structure matrix (DSM) as a measure of modularity.

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