Designing Capital-Intensive Systems with Architectural and Operational Flexibility Using a Screening Model

: Development of capital intensive systems, such as offshore oil platforms or other industrial infrastructure, generally requires a significant amount of capital investment under various resource, technical, and market uncertainties. It is a very challenging task for development co-owners or joint ventures because important decisions, such as system architectures, have to be made while uncertainty remains high. This paper develops a screening model and a simulation framework to quickly explore the design space for complex engineering systems under uncertainty allowing promising strategies or architectures to be identified. Flexibility in systems’ design and operation is proposed as a proactive means to enable systems to adapt to future uncertainty. Architectural and operational flexibility can improve systems’ lifecycle value by mitigating downside risks and capturing upside opportunities. In order to effectively explore different flexible strategies addressing a view of uncertaint...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: COMPLEX
• Authors: Jijun Lin, Olivier de Weck, Richard de Neufville, Bob Robinson, David MacGowan
• Keywords: Capital Intensive Systems, COMPLEX 2009, Downside Risks, Operational Flexibility, Theoretical Computer Science