THE DESIGN PROCESS AS A COMPLEX SYSTEM

摘要

The traditional naval design approach is product-centric, with the goal of generating and evaluating possible vessels in terms of projected needs. This approach assumes that it is possible to identify a fixed engineering problem representing a successful real world vessel. However, the naval environment and representative design problem is shifting, or complex, and cannot be solved in this perspective. This paper presents a novel, complex system-based, perspective of naval design for addressing complex problems. Naval design is modeled as the development and exploration of a changing product landscape, affected by endogenous, exogenous and temporal factors. A case study of the U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ship program illustrates how and why these factors cause complexity in naval design and demonstrate their programmatic impact. Two design processes, Set-Based Design and Systems Engineering, are discussed to show how they implicitly manage these effects, but are unable to consider the underlying complex problem. In order to address how complex problems affect design, a complex system model of design is proposed. The model uses the temporal relationship between product knowledge and decision-making to capture the causal factors of complexity as well expand the current understanding of product-centric design. The paper concludes with a discussion of a network representation of the complex system model, ongoing research into its application, and future work.