Modular product strategies are very popular in product development, especially for variant-rich products where modularity benefits economies of scale due to commonality. In weight-driven sectors such as aviation, modularity is not pursued consequently. Developers fear a performance loss caused by additional design constraints and weight. This paper demonstrates a way to effectively reduce this performance deficit in lightweight modular designs. Components or modules with high sensitivity to weight propagation across the product family system are traced using a DSM-based system model. This allows specific optimization of these modules.
