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Architectural complexity management of engineering systems is becoming a major issue as systems built nowadays implement more complex technologies and innovations. In this paper, we present a preliminary research finding where quantitative values for an engineering system's architectural complexity are mapped with design effort for individual subsystems that are part of the system architecture. This was done to establish relationships between abstract architectural complexity of engineering systems and metrics that can directly be applied to system design and development. A railroad train driving bogie was used for the case study.

A product family is a set of products that are derived from common sets of parts, interfaces, and processes, known as the product platform. To reduce development time and procurement and operating costs of product platform-based variants, the product platform can be designed after consideration of several characteristics, such as modularity, flexibility, sustainability, and complexity. In this paper, the product platform is viewed from the perspective of system architecting. The architectural complexities of both the platform and its variants, which together constitute a product family, can be quantitatively assessed using a specifically tailored metric. This will aid system architects in designing product platforms and resulting product variants with an emphasis on reducing complexity. Architectural complexity management is demonstrated through a case study of a train bogie platform.

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