Characterising the impact of legacy architectures on complex products

Abstract

The architecture of a product is important for its lifecycle performance, but incremental design is often practised to limit the duration, costs and risks of product development. Using computational design synthesis to simulate real design, it is demonstrated that incremental design can reduce achievable product architecture quality compared with original design, but that the effect can be mitigated by allowing modifications to the carried-over architecture. The results quantify the tradeoff between quality and reuse in design, leading to more informed decision-making during product planning.