Abstract. Creating complex systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore a good development strategy often chosen by companies is to evolve existing systems. The understanding that a company has about the impact change has on the system determines its ability to cope with system evolution. Reuse of knowledge and experience becomes therefore, essential. Complex systems are usually the result of a multidisciplinary team, which means that an effective way to capture, organize and present this knowledge, in a fashion that can be used by different disciplines and departments is crucial. Typically, some of this knowledge is present in the form of text documents. However, much of that knowledge is usually lost or hidden, especially in long-lived systems. This leads to unexpected problems that could be prevented if the company had reused the knowledge it already has.In this paper system evolution barriers are discussed, and a method to cope with them is provided. Some companies such as Toyota have already identified the advantages of using an A3 approach 2
Abstract. Literature on how the design process should be conducted is abundant. Also literature on how the design process is performed in practice can be found. An issue that has received less attention is how to keep overview while the design project evolves. This article will look at several aspects of overview in the design process. Encapsulation is proposed as a means to avoid saturation of system designers, yet providing enough detail information. The notion of sampling the design process is introduced, as an equivalent to sampling a signal in time.The paper proposes to use the Function -Key drivers architecting tool (FunKey) as a means to keep overview. Using this tool, it is possible to encapsulate details, yet provide insight and overview where needed. Also, it is possible to sample progress in the design project at a much higher frequency than using the (document) reviews described in system engineering guidelines like the INCOSE handbook.
Creating systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore companies often choose to evolve existing systems. The understanding that a company has about the impact that a change has in the system architecture determines their ability to cope with system evolution.System architects and designers need to have an architecture representation that enables them to understand and to foresee consequences of evolving the system. This representation however is often not documented. Reverse architecting enables to recover the architecture representation. In this paper, experiences in reverse architecting in a industrial case at Philips Healthcare MRI Group is presented. We show that the proposed approach provides an effective framework to reason about evolvability and impact that design changes has on the system.
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