Target Management in Complex System Design Using System Norms

The problem of setting, balancing, and determining priorities of design targets among the subsystems constituting an engineering system, i.e., managing the targets, is addressed. A new norm-based benchmarking approach is proposed to relate the system-level design objectives to subsystem design targets. The proposed approach provides a systematic means of setting and balancing subsystem design targets to deliver the desired system performance and ranks the priorities of the subsystem targets. Furthermore, the use of system norms, rather than output signal norms, to quantify system and subsystem performance reduces the number of design targets in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. The approach is illustrated on a vehicle example, consisting of a frame, body, and body mounts as the subsystems. DOI: 10.1115/1.1897404