Ontological Analysis of Functional Decomposition

摘要

Functional decomposition is a popular technique applied not only in software engineering but also in business modeling and in technical devices design. As its principle it takes a functional view on a system and analyzes it in terms of functions. However, despite its popularity the notion of functional decomposition seems not to be clear-cut and as such may lead to ambiguities in models based on it. The current paper presents the results of the ontological analysis of the notion of functional decomposition. In particular, various relations between functions which may underlie functional decomposition are analyzed and put into the cohesive framework of the Ontology of Functions (OF), which is proposed to be used as a foundation for functional modeling.