Structural complexity metric for engineered complex systems and its application

DSM 2012 Proceedings of the 14th International DSM Conference, Kyoto, Japan

Year: 2012
Editor: Onishi, M.; Maurer, M.; Kirner, K.; Lindemann, U.
Author: Sinha, K.; de Weck, O.
Series: DSM
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Section: System Architectures
Page(s): 181-192
ISBN: 978-3-446-43354-0

Abstract

The complexity of today’s highly engineered products is rooted in the interwoven architecture defined by its components and their interactions. Such structures can be viewed as the adjacency matrix of the associated dependency network representing the product architecture. To evaluate a complex system or to compare it to other systems, numerical assessment of its structural complexity is mandatory. In this paper, we develop a quantitative measure for structural complexity and apply the same to realworld engineered systems like gas turbine engine. It is observed that low topological complexity implies centralized architecture and it increases as one marches towards highly distributed architectures.

Keywords: Design Structure Matrix, structural complexity, topological complexity, real-world engineered systems, gas turbine engine