During product development, the customer or internal stakeholders initiate changes concerning the components or functions of a cyber-physical system (CPS). The complexity of such a CPS causes difficulties in evaluating the effects of a component change. Accordingly, product developers need an assistance system to quantify the impact of a component change on hardware, software, system functions, and production processes. Therefore, this paper focuses on concepts to evaluate the effects of component, functional, and process changes and contributes to its clarification and further understanding of the importance and requirements for such an assistance system. The literature review assesses the identified methods regarding their objectives, application objects, level of automation, and relations characteristics. However, the literature review pointed out that the change prediction method from Clarkson et al. (2004) is well-established in the literature and able to quantify the impact of a change.

Lightweight design in interconnected systems becomes more and more complex as the interdependencies cannot be overseen by the product developer. Varying one component might not only influence the interfaces to other components but also the underlying production systems.

Therefore, this contribution focuses on the product/production interdependencies and how they can be supported within lightweight design. Based on a functional description of the product it is possible to derive new lightweight design solutions and also to evaluate the change propagation in the production system. For this, a method for the impact and risk analysis is integrated in the lightweight design method Extended Target Weighing Approach (ETWA). By doing so, a risk value for the adapted production system can be calculated and different design concepts can be compared.

The application of the developed method on a simplified use-case shows great potentials when evaluating the impact of a newly developed lightweight design solution on an already existing production system supporting the product development in decision making.