A new method for evaluating design dependencies in product architectures

Market pressure to provide increased product variety and additional features remains a constant challenge for many manufacturing companies. Increasing the number of features in a product leads to additional components in the architecture, which leads to more design dependencies. Creating flexible product architectures has become important to be able to minimize the design dependency and redesign efforts to allow companies to respond the market faster. Measuring the design dependencies in a product architecture is difficult and often a subjective process. This study proposes a new method to objectively define design dependencies in a product architecture and can also be used as a metric for comparison between different product architectures as demonstrated in the case study.