A computational method to support product architecture design

The choice of product architecture can affect many factors, from the technical performance of a product to the design effort required, production costs, and satisfaction of lifecycle requirements. This paper explores how computational tools can augment creative methods in product architecture design. It describes a method for synthesising product architectures in the form of networks of components. The set of architectures for a product is specified using constraints on the structure of the network. The method has been implemented as a software tool, and an example illustrates how this might be used in practice. Discussion of the example highlights some of the issues which arise through using the method, particularly those of constructing an appropriate set of constraints, and of identifying promising architectures from the large set of synthesis results. Further work will address these issues and evaluate the approach in practice, to compare the cost-benefit ratio with more conventional methods for architecture design (e.g. brainstorming).