A Comprehensive Treatment of Complex Systems Engineering Design

Engineering complex systems and New Product Development (NPD) are major challenges for contemporary engineering design and must be studied at three levels of: Products, Processes and Organizations (PPO). The science of complexity indicates that complex systems share a common characteristic: they are robust yet fragile. Complex and large scale systems are robust in the face of many uncertainties and variations; however, they can collapse, when facing certain conditions. This is so since complex systems embody many subtle, intricate and nonlinear interactions. Formal modelling exercises with available computational approaches are not able to assist designers to arrive at accurate predictions. This book is an investigation into complex product design. We tackle the issue first by introducing a template and/or design methodology for complex product design. The template is an integrated product design scheme which embodies and combines elements of both design theory and organization theory; in particular distributed (spatial and temporal) problem solving and adaptive team formation are brought together.