ABSTRACT
It is well documented in complex systems design that changing the design of one subsystem will affect the design of other subsystems. Many times capturing any relationship beyond experience-based heuristic rules is difficult because of the complexity of the disciplinary codes and the associated nonlinearities. In this paper, a probabilistic approach to modeling the effects any subsystem design change has on other subsystems is described. Computer-based simulation is used to build approximations of the interfaces and demonstrate how the necessary assumption of the presence of random error in probabilistic statistics is satisfied. A passenger aircraft example is used to verify and validate the approach.