Estimating and Mitigating Design Risk in a Flexible Distributed Design Process

To establish a more flexible relationship between the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and suppliers, the use of flexible contracts in embedded system design has been proposed and it has been shown that such contracts allow a division of risk which often leads to a mitigation of inefficiencies. But from the perspective of the OEM, such flexible contracts also introduce uncertainties regarding the final component behavior the suppliers will deliver. To assess the resulting risk of obtaining an infeasible system configuration, we propose a method to derive an overall certainty to obtain a feasible system configuration under the assumption of uncertain design parameters. Thus, this method enables the OEM to evaluate different setups of flexible contracts with respect to the resulting overall design risk. We also illustrate the application of the proposed method on a hypothetical system design example.