This work has been published using L A T E X 2 ε and the Twentethesis documentclass.Duurt even, maar dan heb je ook wat... SummaryThe development of modern (mechatronic) systems demands close cooperation between experts from multiple engineering disciplines. These disciplines each speak their own engineering language and can even have conflicting views of what the system is. This leads to a complex situation that impedes the communication between these experts, as well as the integration of design and analysis tools.The main 'pressures' in improving multi disciplinary design are the improvement of system performance, time-to-market and cost. This can be improved by facilitating communication between stakeholders, modeling architectural concerns and other important design information, and facilitating capturing and reusing design knowledge across disciplines. These pressures, however, cannot be subject to direct scientific research, as experiments cannot be easily realized: We cannot let multiple companies perform multiple design processes to compare methods that aim to improve the pressures. Instead, the pressures are 'transformed' in the issues of consistency, integration and reuse, which can be evaluated through case studies. As such, the hypothesis for this thesis is: The consistency, integration and reusability of multi-disciplinary design processes can be improved by facilitating communication between stakeholders, modeling architectural concerns and other important design information, and facilitating capturing and reusing design knowledge across disciplines.To help this communication, multiple stakeholders need to have a shared model to: share design decisions, create common understanding of the design process, share deliverables (workflow), and keep this shared information consistent. In such a model, stakeholders can make their own views to create models for their aspects of the system. The information in these views can be connected to other views, and even reused by copying or referencing. This facilitates the stakeholder gathering the information from multiple sources to do his job, or allow exposing his concerns so he can influence activities performed by experts of other disciplines.The argument of this thesis is: there is a lack of a common language that can describe both the system architecture and information flows in the design process. Such a language should enable us to model the shared information between the designers and their models and the tools that they use. There is no unifying modeling language to exchange information across disciplines, across design process phases and across levels of granularity. This means we lack the means to make a model of all design aspects, especially the ones that cut across the design disciplines. We lack the means to model how information from the mono disciplinary design tasks is handed over to subsequent design tasks. And we lack the means VIII to provide a big picture of how mono disciplinary design information is connected to the abstract system wide ...
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
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