Metrics and methods for complexity analysis: Identifying driving factors of structural complexity in modular vehicle platforms

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores how module and interface variation can be used to quantifyarchitectural complexity in modular vehicle platforms at Volvo Group TTI. By combiningstructural complexity theory with entropy-based assessment of module variantcomplexity, a quantitative methodology for architectural complexity assessment wasdeveloped. The proposed metric evaluates architectural complexity based on moduleconnectivity, module and interface variation, and interdependencies between modules.Shannon entropy was adapted to assess module variant complexity. In addition, adata-processing pipeline was developed to enable large-scale analysis of industrialplatform data. The results show that the proposed metric responds consistently tostructural changes in the platform architecture and captures important characteristicsassociated with architectural complexity such as connectivity and interdependency.The framework therefore enables systematic and data-driven comparisons of modularplatforms. The proposed metric should be used in combination with other metricsand methods to fully capture architectural complexity and support balanced and robustdesign decisions. The metric is designed for hardware platforms. Future studiescould improve measurement accuracy of module variant complexity by analysing thephysical structure of the module variants in detail. Additionally, future work coulddevelop a systematic method for selecting interface complexity values.