Towards Combinatorial Engineering of

The paper describes combinatorial model-ing of decomposable systems: hierarchical system models, system components, design alternatives (DAs) for system components and their interconnection (Is), estimates of DAs and Is, changes of the systems. We point out some basic combinatorial operations: combinatorial description and presentation ; analysis and evaluation; revealing of bottlenecks by elements; comparison of system versions; synthesis of composite DAs; modiication (e.g., improvement, adaptation). The investigation is based on hierarchical morphological multicriteria design (HMMD) which involves an examination of the following: the design of hierarchical system model, the generation and assessment DAs and Is, composing of composite DAs, and improvements on the base of bottlenecks. Our list of support combi-natorial problems is the following: design of hierarchical system models; multicriteria ranking (ordinal assessment), morphological clique (synthesis), etc.