On integrated modularization for situated product configuration

Abstract: Road transports face increasing societal challenges with respect to emissions, safety, and traffic congestion, as well as business challenges. Truck automation, e.g. self-driving trucks may be utilized to address some of these issues. Autonomous transport vehicles may be characterized as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). A drawback is that CPS significantly increase technical complexity and thus introduce new challenges to system architecting.A product architecture is the interrelation between physical components and their function, i.e. their purpose. Product architectures can be categorized as being modular or integral. The main purpose of a modular architecture is to enable external variety and at the same time internal commonality. Products with a modular architecture are configured from predesigned building blocks, i.e. modules. A stable module, which is a carrier of main function(s) has standardized interfaces, is configured for company-specific reasons, which means it supports a company-specific (business) strategy.In this thesis, the present state at the heavy vehicle manufacturer Scania, concerning product architecting, modularization, product description and configuration is investigated. Moreover, a new clustering based method for product modularization that integrates product complexity and company business strategies is proposed. The method is logically verified with multiple industrial cases, where the architecture of a heavy truck driveline is used as a test bench. The driveline contains synergistic configurations of mechanical, electrical and software technologies that are constituents of an automated  and/or semi-autonomous system, i.e. the driveline may be characterized as a CPS. The architecture is analyzed both from technical complexity and business strategy point of view. The presented research indicates that a structured methodology which supports the development of the product architecture is needed at Scania, to enable control of the increasing technical complexity in the Cyber-Physical Systems. Finally, configuration rules are identified to be highly important in order to successfully realize a modular product architecture. A drawback with this approach is that the solution space becomes hard to identify, therefore a complete and flexible product description methodology is essential. The results from the case studies indicate that clustering of a Product Architecture DSM may result in a modular architecture with significantly reduced complexity, but with clusters that contain conflicting module drivers. It is also identified that the new modularization methodology is capable of identifying and proposing reasonable module candidates that address product complexity as well as company-specific strategies. Furthermore, several case studies show that the proposed method can be used for analyzing and finding the explicit and/or implicit, technical as well as strategic, reasons behind the architecture of an existing product.