Entropy‐based system assessment metric for determining architecture's robustness to different stakeholder perspectives

Abstract

In this study, a new system assessment metric is proposed to evaluate the robustness of system architectures to different stakeholder perspectives and decomposition preferences. Typically, the decomposition of a system architecture into a modular configuration is based on the function‐based perspective of the design teams, which can be different from the perspectives of other stakeholders such as the manufacturing teams and field service organization. In this paper, a system architecture is decomposed into different modular configurations on the basis of the preferred perspectives of various stakeholders. The generated configurations are then compared to function‐based modular configurations in terms of the diffusion of the original function‐based module components into modules generated from different perspectives. The degree of diffusion is measured using a newly proposed entropy based metric referred to as the module diffusion index. The proposed metric provides stakeholders with a quantifiable measure of the robustness of a particular system architecture with respect to the preferred decomposition strategy of different stakeholders. The proposed metric can be used to assess different system architectures in terms of their robustness to perspective‐based decompositions. A case study is conducted wherein different mechanical clock architectures are assessed in terms of the robustness to different perspective‐based decompositions to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metric.

Multi-attribute optimization-based system decomposition considering several value chain stakeholder perspectives

“…A condensed explanation of the metric is presented in this study. For the detailed derivation, readers are referred to the paper by Ahn et al (2018). The MDI can be defined as In particular, when the individual elements of the ith module configured for perspective A are diffused to a number of modules for perspective B, the MDI value is the exponential function of the module diffusion entropy S AB i .…”

“…From the traditional engineering design viewpoint, robustness refers to the ability of a system to function normally in the event of uncertainties within the operating environment and system conditions (Phadke 1989). However, in this study, robustness pertains to that of system architecture decomposition considering different stakeholder perspectives (Ahn et al 2018). Modularity pertains to the ability of a system to be decomposed into distinct subsystems with each subsystem being tightly integrated within itself but loosely connected to other subsystems (Baldwin and Clark 2000).…”

Design structure matrix‐based modularization approach for complex systems with multiple design constraints

“…Baylis et al introduced a Pareto‐optimization approach for product platform modularity and commonality. Ahn et al proposed a metric‐based approach to generate modular systems that are robust to the perspectives of different system stakeholders.…”