CIRJE-J-148. Okuno, Masahiro and Yasunori Watanabe, "Production Architecture as a Coordination System", February 2006.

In this paper, we define the product architecture as a design concept of a product system which needs complicated coordination among parts to achieve the user's objectives. And we will show that by using a modular architecture we can simplify (i) the functions of the product, and (ii) the relationship between orders and operations. These results lead to the conclusion that human beings, who behave in a context-dependent manner, can not only control highly complicated systems, but also design new systems via combination of division of labor and cooperation.