Study of System Interfaces Through the Notion of Complementarity

Abstract

Understanding emergence is an important goal of system thinking, as it can express both desirable and negative properties of products and systems. Emergence has also a special importance as it has a direct link to the performance of products and systems, and thus has a direct relationship with the quality of life and thus sustainability in our societies. Emergence and system thinking are closely related to engineering design methodologies. In our paper, we develop a more precise definition of emergence through the core principles of systems complementarity that are similarity, irreducibility and sophisticated relationships expressed through the interfaces between systems, subsystems or product components.We demonstrate the utility of the approach based on an aircraft pylon case study by presenting a detailed definition of an interface design matrix and analyse how pylon subsystems influence emergence. The results have shown that the product can be perfectly represented by a model-based approach supporting interface management and the assessment of system complementarity. In turn, this approach allows to go beyond a qualitative definition of emergence, as it proposes a quantitative approach through the assessment of complementarity.

Supporting the digital thread through the principles of complementarity

“…With the growth of multidisciplinary products/systems and teams, the notion of complementarity to support federated systems becomes more and more important. We propose to describe the complementarity of two federated systems based on the following principles: the affinity of their functions and their irreducibility of their systems essence, combined with the definition of sophisticated relationships between systems entities (Brovar et al, 2021). At the functional level, two systems are considered affine if the purposes of their use are in the same functional domain and, thus, allow them to be interfaced and placed in close relationship.…”