Managing Complexity Through Selective Decoupling

Designers of complex systems are often confounded by the tendency for design changes to increase performance on some dimensions while decreasing it on others. While adopting a more modular architecture may temper these opposing effects, modularization can also deprive designers of opportunities to harness complementarities among system elements. This paper explores this tension using an NK model in which product designers can modify the structure of their fitness landscapes by suppressing or restoring interactions between components. We find that these changes can lead to improved performance by flattening harmful interactions that would otherwise cause search efforts to become trapped on local fitness peaks. Despite the fact that this process, which we call selective decoupling, tends to lower the maximum performance of a given component, it may increase the maximum attainable product performance. Moreover, selective decoupling can trigger the restoration of previously suppressed interactions, enabling t...

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Unknown venue

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.5465/AMBPP.2014.11310ABSTRACT
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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