Design of mechatronic systems is becoming increasingly complex. Companies must continuously reduce time-to-market while increasing the quality, diversity, and functionality of their products. As a result, more and more specialists from various domains are needed to develop such products. To reduce time-to-market, many companies look to reducing the time it takes to design a product. Many focus on the reuse of design objects, leading to libraries of templates and standard components to speed up their design process. However, these reusable design objects are developed and maintained in the specialists’ domains, resulting in communication and integration issues between these domains. This paper discusses these issues and proposes a combined approach for model reuse, design integration, and communication between the designers, design tools, and models involved. A case study at a multi-national company successfully demonstrated that the approach leads to a faster and more consistent design process.
From interviewing developers and analyzing examples from industry, the authors have concluded that communication
The goal of this work is to practically determine the role of product architecture models to support communication for improving development practices of complex mechatronic products. This paper contains descriptions, observations, and lessons learned from case studies in which the authors tested a language to represent product architectures during product development in a company, as well as the reasons leading to the use of the specific language/model. The tests include construction of architecture models, direct use of the architecture information, model generation from the architecture model, reuse of architecture model information, clarification of existing documentation, and transition towards model-based product development. The work points out desired characteristics of product architecture models as well as characteristics of the necessary implementation tools and framework.
There is a rather recent tendency to define the physical structure and the control structure of a system concurrently when designing the architecture of a product, i.e., to perform codesign. We argue that co-design can only be enabled when the mutual influence between physical system and control is made evident to the designer at an early stage. Though the idea of design integration is not new, to the best of our knowledge, there is no computer tooling that explicitly supports this activity by enabling co-design as stated before. In this paper the authors propose a method for co-design of physical and control architectures as a better approach to design mechatronic systems, allowing to exploit the synergy between software and hardware and detecting certain design problems at an early stage of design. The proposed approach is supported by a set of tools and demonstrated through an example case.
The development of control software for mechatronic systems requires data and information from all design domains in order to create the required integrated functionality. This paper proposes a method that combines function modeling and multi-domain modeling primitives to generate control software. Provided a function model based on the Function-Behavior-State modeling paradigm and performance requirements, a knowledge-based engineering application instantiates a virtual product model and control software for a target platform. Object-oriented modeling techniques provide for the development of primitive libraries, which represent both hardware and software components, while integrated design rules ensure that components are correctly placed and connected. Requirements are translated to software specific parameters. A case study of a mobile robot shows that for specific applications both target and simulation control software code can be generated from the same input, and a generated virtual product model can serve as a simulation model in order to validate functionality.
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