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Imagine two machines that are integrated with each other. In scenario 1, there is one pipe that connects them. In scenario 2, there are many pipes that connect different components of them together. Is there an eng term for describing the difference between these integrations?
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loosely vs. tightly coupled? or weakly vs. strongly coupled? simple vs. complex coupling? Key diff seems to be whether in scenario b whether there is parallelism.
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For eg. in a train, there are mechanical, electrical, and pneumatic connections between cars. The mechanical one is a SPOF. If it fails, the other two get ripped apart too. But if electrical fails, then the train can keep moving, it's just electrical supply that fails (I think)
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There's purely parallel ones. A five-legged table can probably tolerate any 1 leg failing, and several pairs failing. It's a 5-point redundant connection to the floor, with like 1.5 leg break tolerance.
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In general, I'd analyze it as: given n connection, you have m=2^n failure modes, and you can define the functional degradation over the m points in failure space. That's the "coupling sensitivity function" perhaps.
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Super helpful. I wonder how you'd describe a scenario where a third machine acts as an integration layer between two machines. As a result, to the end-user, the integration appears modular, but they're actually loosely coupled together.
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I think that's not a distinct type of thing. That's just a cascade of 2 couplings. You'd make a graph of things and each edge would be a coupling-bundle with a set of properties. There's formalisms for modeling such things, but they're mostly not philosophically interesting.
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