An Infinite Regress Model of Design Change Propagation in Complex Systems

Abstract

In complex systems, design changes of one component or subsystem may require the redesign of other components or be stimulated by the redesign of other components. Changes propagate through the design dependency paths among the components of a system and thus present challenges to the design and management of the system. Therefore, an assessment of the influence and susceptibility of components is useful for system design decisions such as which components to standardize, modularize, or embed flexibility to address future design changes. Finding the overall influence or susceptibility of individual components throughout a complex system is an infinite regress problem, as both the sources and targets of the influences are the same set of components. A component influences some other components, which influence other components, and so on. Such influences can be propagated back to the initiating components through cycles of design dependencies among components. In this paper, we model change propagation in complex systems as an infinite regress problem and derive eigenvector-based indicators of component influence and susceptibility. We demonstrate our method based on several case studies.