Functional Complexity Quantification for Engineered Systems
Name
bahadur-lbpatel7-sm-sdm-2026-thesis.pdf
Size
5.17 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d40e4aa86d9b0915f733b0ab855f533d
Author(s)
Bahadur, Lal
Advisor(s)
Rebentisch, Eric
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Accurately assessing the scope of effort required to complete the development of new engineered systems is important to creating a development strategy and planning the allocation of resources over the development lifecycle. Doing this in the earliest phases of the development lifecycle is particularly challenging, where more may be known about the problem space than the solution space. The desired system functions may be characterized, but the elements of the system or even the system's physical architecture may not yet have been established. One potential way to characterize the scope of work and to differentiate between different system concepts is to characterize their respective functional complexity. Functional complexity has been explored from several different perspectives, unfortunately, often without producing practical methods to use it in a complex engineering context. This research identifies gaps in existing functional complexity assessment methods through a review of academic literature and insights from a practitioner’s perspective. A set of measures and a framework for characterizing the relative complexity of a system is presented, along with possible scenarios where this approach might be used during the early stages of the development of a new engineered system when little more than its desired functions are known.
MIT Department
System Design and Management Program.
Terms of Use
In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
Copyright retained by author(s)
Persistent DSpace Link
