Product Complexity Management Enabled by a Model-Based Approach

As contemporary engineered systems become more interdependent, there is a growing need to manage their system complexity. However, system complexity only exists as implicit and heterogeneous information. This situation causes difficulties to obtain and analyze system complexity. This manuscript illustrates a model-based approach to support system complexity management. The system complexity includes dynamic complexity and structural complexity in this manuscript. The proposed approach includes complexity modeling and complexity analysis. As for complexity modeling, a graph-matrix hybrid complexity modeling approach is proposed to describe the dynamic and structure complexity information. The graph-based architecture models are developed by a unified meta-meta modeling approach. The connections among different architecture models are described by design structure matrix. As for complexity analysis, a general complexity metric provides dynamic and structural complexity values for the designer to evaluate the system. Besides, automatic ontology modeling is introduced to integrate complexity modeling and complexity analysis. Finally, a case study about aero-engine design is conducted. The complexity management processes of three different scenarios are compared in this case study. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed approach is general and applicable to any engineered system and can support the trade-off between complex product design schemes