System Architecture: Strategy and Product Development for Complex Systems, First Edition

Part 4 Architecture as Decisions

Parts 2 and 3 presented principles and methods for analyzing and synthesizing architecture. Because of the complexity inherent in architecture, many of the steps involved in analysis and synthesis are difficult to conduct exhaustively. For example, we considered only seven concepts for the Hybrid Car in Chapter 12, and we did not exhaustively search the space of concept ­fragment combinations. Although some aspects of these tasks can be reduced to computation, great care must be taken when distilling the outputs of computational models to yield recommendations. With these thoughts in mind, in Part 4 we embark on architectural decision support, where we will investigate how methods and tools can support, but not ...