Scenario based development of robust product architectures

Today many companies develop modular product architectures to face the challenge of maintaining a high degree of differentiation whilst reducing costs through economies of scale. To achieve the latter, the number of variants and product generations based on one architecture have increased significantly. This brings new challenges to the development process, especially when handling emerging technologies in dynamic markets. Expected changes in future product generations have to be anticipated when designing the architecture to cope with increased architecture lifetimes and minimize modification efforts.