IMPLICATIONS OF PRODUCT SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE ON DESIGN SUSTAINABILITY

Product system architecture defines the foundations, components, and configuration upon which a design is conceived and can have major impacts upon design sustainability. Relatively little work has been done to fully understand the implications. A first step toward the goal of improving our understanding is to better quantify the attributes of product system architecture. For example, modular architectures may be beneficial from a sustainability perspective, whereas integral architecture may be better for performance. Using interaction graphs and the mathematics of graph theory, metrics for evaluating product system architecture are proposed to quantify and make design trade-offs. These metrics are developed from information derived from the geometric design domain based upon part connectivity. With an understanding of product system architecture, it is envisioned that experienced or student system designers can be taught to make more informed decisions resulting in systems that holistically consider configuration design trade-offs, thus filling a gap that is seriously lacking in terms of educating engineering designers of the future