Structural Analysis Crossing Domain Borders

There has been a growing recent interest for domain-spanning dependency analysis of product development systems. Several models for depicting these inter-domain relationships have been provided with the Domain-Mapping Matrix (DMM), and the more comprehensive Multiple-Domain Matrix (MDM), but existing methods are often limited to tackle specific problems. This paper points out some general issues regarding structural analysis between domains, and suggests directions for a generic analysis of inter-domain dependencies. Inspired by General System Theory, three structural criteria are converted into indicators that are comparable, also between system and project borders.