Revisiting the Divide and Conquer Strategy to Deal with Complexity in Product Design

Development of modern products is complex and exceeds the comprehension of a single engineer, who cannot understand every detail of a product. Some of the current approaches to deal with the complex product design are based on the "divide-and-conquer" (D&C) approach. Those approaches in their present form, however, reveal shortcomings in many multidisciplinary problems. This paper gives an overview on current D&C approaches to deal with complex products. It also presents the general philosophy of the work carried out in the intelligent mechanical systems (IMS) group toward developing tools and methods for improvement of complex product development.