Proposal for technology architecture analysis

— Application of the analysis method to the development of car navigation systems —

Abstract

Product development involves many element technologies, so methods that analyze the integration process are important for R&D management. This paper proposes a new method to analyze technology architecture: i.e., a method for determining how to combine element technologies, which takes into account relations between product function and element technologies, and the complementary or substitutive relations among these element technologies. We applied this method to the case of development of car navigation systems, where the combination of element technologies changed several times. From this example application of our method, we obtained important insights into the analysis of technology architecture.