Practical E-Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management

3

System hierarchies and components

Learning objectives

• To understand the evolution of various hierarchical models.

• To understand the components of each hierarchical level.

• To understand the interaction between hierarchical levels.

• To understand the purpose, benefits and future trends of hierarchical components.

3.1 Introduction

The ways in which system architectures have been viewed over the years were heavily influenced by the evolution of technology. As systems became more complex with more functionality, and more and more activities were systemized, the landscape of system architecture has changed. Some of the first architectures used to classify systems had three levels to indicate conceptual architecture layouts. AMR developed ...