We are investigating principles for the design of product structures that can be readily adapted in response to large changes in customer requirements. In this paper, we report on a part of our investigation, namely, the effect of Suh’s independence axiom on achieving a modular design for a hierarchical system. We demonstrate that there is a relationship between achieving functional independence and reducing the interactions between modules by comparing the functional independence of several designs reflecting different requirements on module interfaces for a portal frame. Open research questions are identified. Our desire in writing this paper is to describe some work in progress and foster discussion rather than offering a prescription for solution.
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Chen et al. (1994) studied this question.