A metric to assist the product families architecture definition

Abstract

It is difficult to define products architecture for two main reasons: the high number of architecture alternatives and the lack of an evaluation criteria to these options. This article addresses the alternative architectures evaluation issue using a cost estimate approach. The purpose of this study is to describe a metric that assists the product architecture definition. The metric showed here is built over the relative estimates of the developing and assembly costs and was created as a tool to define a product family architecture; It uses the products cost estimates and functional descriptions. In addition to describing the metric that helps to define the product architecture, this article also illustrates its application to a family of four products sharing the same functional model. Finally, the metric presented is analyzed, as well as the potential to its use with computational algorithms to deal with complex problems.