Structural Complexity Quantification for Engineered Complex Systems and Implications on System Architecture and Design
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V03AT03A044-DETC2013-12013(1).pdf
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1.02 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1859a2ac839a6ba4899983ce47596345
Author(s)
de Weck, Olivier L.
Sinha, Kaushik
de Weck, Olivier L
Date Issued
August 2013
Journal
Volume 3A: 39th Design Automation Conference
Publisher
ASME International
Citation
Sinha, Kaushik, and Olivier L. de Weck. “Structural Complexity Quantification for Engineered Complex Systems and Implications on System Architecture and Design.” Volume 3A: 39th Design Automation Conference (August 4, 2013).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The complexity of today's highly engineered products is rooted in the interwoven architecture defined by its components and their interactions. Such structures can be viewed as the adjacency matrix of the associated dependency network representing the product architecture. To evaluate a complex system or to compare it to other systems, numerical assessment of its structural complexity is essential. In this paper, we develop a quantitative measure for structural complexity and apply the same to real-world engineered systems like gas turbine engines. It is observed that low topological complexity implies centralized architectures and that higher levels of complexity generally indicate highly distributed architectures. We posit that the development cost varies non-linearly with structural complexity. Empirical evidence of such behavior is presented from the literature and preliminary results from simple experiments involving assembly of simple structures further strengthens our hypothesis. We demonstrate that structural complexity and modularity are not necessarily negatively correlated using a simple example. We further discuss distribution of complexity across the system architecture and its strategic implications for system development efforts.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2013-12013
