Effecting product reliability and life cycle costs with early design phase product architecture decisions

Abstract

Identifying the impact of a design decision on a product's life cycle characteristics is important, but often difficult. Constructing links between these aspects is even more challenging in the early phases of design, since the consequences of the decisions are far away and little is yet known about the product's life cycle. Nevertheless, early design decisions have a high influence on the life cycle characteristics of a product. One early design decision is the selection of product architecture, that is, the fundamental structure and layout of a product. In this paper, we present a method to determine a relative comparison of product architectures based on a model of life cycle costs that c..