Hierarchical functional exchanges

Capella
1

Hi Capella team!
I am looking for a mechanism helping to design functional exchanges top down, or to abstract nested functional exchanges between 2 parent functions as “functional exchanges container”. Does Capella feature such thing? To make it clearer: I am thinking to something that may be a “Functional exchange breakdown” diagram.
P.S. Categories may be used to emulate part of this behaviour but AFAIK low level functional exchanges have to be created before a category can be displayed.

2

Hi,
Capella does not provide today mechanisms to manage hierarchical functional exchanges. We have had the request once or twice in about 6 or 7 years. We have ideas to support that, but this is not in our current roadmaps.
We understand the need in certain cases, but we also have to be aware that the way functional analysis is managed in Capella and in particular the way exchanges between high level functions are automatically deduced from low level ones are two key elements that ease the adoption of Capella. So if one day we introduce hierarchical exchanges we will have to be careful so that this will only be “an option”.

3

Thank you for the quick answer Stéphane!

4

I have a question regarding Stephane’s answer: if there is no hierarchy (top-down decomposition) of the functional exchanges, what would be the mechanism adopted by Arcadia / capella to ensure that the functional exchanges that are defined at higher level are all taken into account at the lower levels?
Wael

5

In a top down approach, functional exchanges between high level functions don’t stay at high level. When breaking down a function, the goal it to move all incoming and outgoing exchanges towards the sub functions.
WHich means in a complete design, all exchanges are only between leaf functions. If you display two high level functions, the tool will automatically display the low level exchanges existing between the respective sub functions. There is also a dedicated mechanism allowing to associate functional exchanges with categories and display only these categories.
I invite you to have a look the last demos of the following webinar, this is pretty well illustrated:
https://youtu.be/aefpyMBxB-4 (see at 40’40)

6

Thank you for the discussion on functional exchanges. In LAB diagram, I would like to hide component exchanges that belongs to a specific category. Is there any direct approach to do this in the tool?

7

Does that help?

8

Thanks a lot Stephane. Got it.