Enhancing Collaborative Modular Product Development: Interface Allocation and Associated Responsibilities

For meeting the dynamic demands of customers on a product, development increasingly relies on expertise from a diverse array of disciplines and domains. Only this collaboration makes it possible to provide comprehensive and practical approaches to solutions for various challenges. However, in addition to variety-induced complexity, this adds complexity due to increased collaboration. Particularly in developing modular product families, this circumstance leads to an expanded consideration of collaboration in subsystems, enabling effective product-family-system development. Collaboration in modular product families leads to a necessary integration of the consideration of interfaces' dependencies, responsibilities, and specifications. This paper presents an approach to identify and manage interface responsibilities in multi-disciplinary modular product-family systems using product and organization view matrices. Results from previous studies are put into a processual context to coordinate the collaboration considered. A matrix-based solution on product and allocated organizational elements improves collaboration.