Dynamic Evolution of Product Architecture — Alternative view of Technical progress of Numerical Controller —

The viewpoint, the product architecture, has the possibility to provide the industry analysis a new analyzing angle. However as for the most of the previous studies, it adopts the analysis frame to argue about the convenience of the each architecture and the conformability with the product development style and to compare, by thinking that the each product architecture is given. We will do the case analysis concerning the evolution of the architecture of the NC(Numerical Control) system which lasted 35 years from 1962 to 1997 in order to consider the evolution of the product architecture. Thus we led the following hypotheses as for the evolution of the product architecture. First, the product architecture basically evolves from the integral architecture to the module architecture, and then to the direction of the open architecture. Then 2nd, but the change is not always in one direction, and when and the epoch-making element technique such as the microprocessor is born, the technical problem about the design of the architecture occurs and it can be sometimes retraced from the module to the integral.