Structural complexity management (StCM) is an established methodology to manage complexity within engineering design. Complexity management is necessary if complexity for example due to shorter product life cycles and manifold customer requirements cannot be handled anymore. The application of StCM on complex systems is often challenging. Various uncertainties affect this stage as the final design and properties are not clear yet. A lot of other factors such as the quality of the available information, or the skills of the modelers also have to be considered. Thereby, the shape of occurring uncertainty can be manifold and have several features. This paper presents an approach on the precautionary identification of uncertainties. Therefore, based on a literature review on different types of uncertainty and an approach on uncertainty management from another modeling discipline, we present the Uncertainty Process step Matrix (UPsM). The UPsM identifies and sensitizes for the incorporation of uncertainty into the model. It encourages modelers to recognize the locations of their specific uncertainty and thus, this approach serves as a step towards precautionary uncertainty management.     «

Structural complexity management (StCM) is an established methodology to manage complexity within engineering design. Complexity management is necessary if complexity for example due to shorter product life cycles and manifold customer requirements cannot be handled anymore. The application of StCM on complex systems is often challenging. Various uncertainties affect this stage as the final design and properties are not clear yet. A lot of other factors such as the quality of the available infor...     »