IMPACT OF ARCHITECTURE TYPES AND DEGREE OF MODULARITY ON CHANGE PROPAGATION INDICES
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Marco Cantamessa, Gaetano Cascini, Dorian Marjanovic, Francesca Montagna
Author: Colombo, Edoardo Filippo; Cascini, Gaetano; de Weck, Olivier L.
Series: ICED
Institution: 1: Politecnico di Milano, Italy; 2: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States of America
Section: Design Organisation and Management
Page(s): 187-198
ISBN: 978-1-904670-66-7
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Change propagation has been investigated in many case studies; anyway, the effect of architectural choices like the degree of modularity or the presence of bus elements is still unclear. This paper evaluates the probability density functions of three change propagation indices (Incoming Change Likelihood, Incoming Change Impact and Outgoing Change Risk) in order to understand if architectural choices affect the change propagation behaviour of a technical system. The indices are obtained from 13,824 DSMs generated with Monte-Carlo methods; on each DSM, 12 feasible change behaviour samples are mapped. First, a small set of synthetic results is compared with a case study as an initial validation. Then, the three indices overall distributions are shown. Finally, the entire indices database is subdivided into four clusters (Integral, Modular, Star, Modular-Star) according to the architecture type of the original DSM. The comparison of the clusters shows that the presence of modules in the architecture significantly decrease the risk for change propagation, while the presence of bus components has a more limited effect.
Keywords: Product Architecture, Change Propagation, Design Engineering