Design for adaptability - Support of upgrade strategies to react to evolving stakeholder needs and requirements

All systems and products are designed to fulfil the needs and requirements of their stakeholders. Those needs evolve over time, though, and thus products that can be adapted to altered demands and boundary conditions most flexibly will lead to an increased life cycle value to stakeholders. Technological evolution of system components provides a basis for potential improvement of overall system properties. Which system properties are affected by upgrades of which component - or more goal-oriented - which alternatives exist to achieve a certain requirement change under consideration of components' technological evolution is substantial during the architecture of systems in order to enable the possibility of physical changes in system-design in terms of feasibility and effort. This paper presents a systematic approach to support the identification of upgrade strategies to react to evolving stakeholder needs and requirements on a system architecture level. The approach takes into account technological evolution of utilized system components and illustrates the influence on overall system performance parameters.