Day, R: Large Scale Product Modularity

Decreasing time and costs is a major objective in many businesses today. Including modularity in the early phases can effectively decrease time spent on and costs associated with a project. The task of identifying modules within a product early in the process (when decisions are less expensive) is made less daunting by using the techniques of functional modeling and module heuristics. This work discusses the results of the efforts to verify the module heuristics on large products. Observations on needed modifications to the functional modeling technique and original module heuristics are reported along with an investigation of using potential risk statements to formulate modules. It is the finding of this work that the original module heuristics do still apply to large products. These module heuristics can be combined with themselves or other heuristics to create super modules. This increases the heuristics efficiency and usefulness in regards to large products.