Defining product architectures

Identifying product architectures is recognized as a critical activity during the preliminary design phase since the selected architecture has a great impact on the product quality, on the organization of the following phases of the design project and on the global performance of this project. System architects need methods to pre-determine cohesive modules and integrative elements. In this paper we present a new method to jointly design the functional and physical architectures. Starting from an incidence matrix that represents the couplings between elements of two domains (here, functions and components), it generates a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) for each domain. Each DSM is then rearranged by a clustering algorithm in order to reveal a "satisfactory" architecture. To illustrate our approach, we present an industrial case study in the framework of a new automobile engine development project.