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

16.4 Patterns in System Architecting Decisions

Going from a list of decisions and alternatives (such as the one presented in the previous section for the NEOSS example) to their formulation as an architecture optimization problem can be a hard task in itself. However, we have observed that a number of Patterns appear over and over when ­system architecture optimization problems are formulated. For example, the problem of partitioning the Saturn V architecture into stages is fundamentally the same as the instrument-packaging problem defined in the previous section. We essentially have to allocate elements to bins in both cases, and the optimization algorithm doesn’t care whether it is assigning remote sensing instruments to orbits or assigning ...