The product development community faces new challenges due to a drastic increase in the scale and complexity of engineered systems. Modelling these systems is becoming increasingly important as it allows a better process/product understanding for analysing changes while avoiding several iteration loops. In this article a recent decomposition principle, called DSM (Design Structure Matrix), is extended to a discrete-time dynamical system based on process components. The system is modelled as detailed as necessary by aligning the used interaction knowledge to an introduced weighting coefficient. Proportional, functional and qualitative knowledge of the coherences is considered and linguistic process knowledge is thereby included via Fuzzy-Logic. Hence, the developed strategy allows to handle nonlinear relations as well as uncertainties. First applications are shown on two simplified examples, together with analyses of process fixed points and attracting regions using well-known mathematical methods.     «

The product development community faces new challenges due to a drastic increase in the scale and complexity of engineered systems. Modelling these systems is becoming increasingly important as it allows a better process/product understanding for analysing changes while avoiding several iteration loops. In this article a recent decomposition principle, called DSM (Design Structure Matrix), is extended to a discrete-time dynamical system based on process components. The system is modelled as deta...     »