Design Rationale & System Description Aspects in Product Platform Design – A generic and autonomous system-based approach

Preprint, 2011

One key to efficient and effective re-use in product developing companies is platform-based design. Future platforms need to more efficiently deal with: concurrency, information-rich designs, and fast realization of design derivates. This calls for new ways to describe platform-based designs. The configurable component concept is intended to support concurrent, complex and variant-rich system design considering the complete product lifecycle. This paper presents a function-means model, acting as a design rationale, incorporated into the configurable component concept. This includes an adaptation to handle design bandwidth, a more transparent and explicit constraint handling, and the composition of a system design rationale based on multiple function-means models. The approach enables the description of a complex, encapsulated configurable system composed using multiple (sub-) systems.