Andrés A. Alvarez Cabrera

High Level Model Integration for Design of Mechatronic Systems

Development of mechatronic products, and their controllers, carries a series of difficulties related mainly to product complexity. This paper discusses such difficulties and introduces a proposal of a framework of prototype tools that aim to support controller design for mechatronic systems by providing control software generation. This work emphasizes the high level system description embedded in such framework and the model integration aspects.

MULTI DOMAIN DESIGN: INTEGRATION AND REUSE

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.

Capturing Design Process Information in Complex Product Development

From interviewing developers and analyzing examples from industry, the authors have concluded that communication issues during the design process are a key factor of the complexity of product development. These communication issues stem from a lack of insight in the workflow between designers and their resources, and the lack of insight in the relation of this workflow to the system architecture. To the best knowledge of the authors, currently there are no suitable models and tools that allow capturing and understanding such information in an integrated way. This work contributes by providing requirements for tools and models, and proposes a modeling language that fulfils such requirements. With this language we introduce a method for capturing design process information: The language can combine multiple stakeholder-based views on their system aspects of interest with architectural concerns, and can specify which resources in terms of models and parametric information are needed from other stakeholders to develop these aspects. The language was also developed as a stepping stone for automation of design processes

Model Generation for the Verification of Automatically Generated Mechatronic Control Software

The development of embedded control software for mechatronic systems is mainly a non-automated process, requiring the intervention of a human programmer. A project has been started with the intention to develop a set of prototype tools and a framework with which an interdisciplinary product development team can automatically generate control software for mechatronic systems. This paper will discuss the development of a Control Model Generator as part of this project, which is envisioned to be able to generate system dynamics models at various levels of detail, which can be used to verify the automatically generated code at software level. Using SysML and Modelica, a model based view can be maintained throughout the model generation process.

Modeling and Using Product Architectures in Inudstrial Mechatronic Product Development : Experiments and Observations

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.Copyright

Enabling control software generation by using mechatronics modeling primitives

Mechatronic systems are characterized by the synergetic integration of mechanic, electronic, software and control design aspects. The development of control software 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 automatically. An architecture model, based on the Function-Behavior-State modeling paradigm, provides the decomposition and flow of both functionality and implementation, which serves as input to a knowledge-based engineering application. The control software is subsequently extracted from a virtual product model composed of instantiated modeling primitives. A case study of a mobile robot shows how for a specific application the modeling are defined and how a high-level function model for an environment mapping mission is translated into directly implementable software code. This approach could be extended to real-life mechatronic products, and will improve consistency and reduce development time and cost.

Architecture-Level Representation and Analysis of Regulatory Controller Configuration for Complex Mechatronic Systems

We propose a method for automatically extracting information that is relevant for the controller design activities from a model that represents architecture-level information and concerns, and show how the extracted information can be analyzed for control design purposes. Control design is an inherently multidisciplinary activity that can benefit from improvements in the communication and exchange of updated design information between stakeholders during product development. In this proposal, the critical source of improvement for communication is the use of architecture-level models at the core of design activities. The main contributions of this work are the use of an architecture model and the extraction of information (relevant to control design) from it, while, with the exception of an experimental contribution, the control analysis process is taken from existing linear structured system techniques.

Architecture-Centric Design Approach for Multidisciplinary Product Development

Managing complexity is a crucial task during the development process of multidisciplinary complex products. To achieve an efficient and effective development process of such a product, all the stakeholders must maintain a common understanding of the system and mutually linked detailed information of the product. This chapter proposes system architecture as a concept wider than product architecture, which provides such an overview as well as information that links various detailed information about the product. System architecture includes not only structural elements and relations among them but also functions, behaviors represented by working principles, and a variety of requirements. The working principles are modeled with physical phenomena and the involved parameters and relations among those parameters (e.g., equations). This chapter presents three prototype tools for system architecting illustrated with examples.

Supporting Co-Design of Physical and Control Architectures of Mechatronic Systems

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.Copyright

An Architecture-Level Specification for Automated Supervisory Controller Design

We propose a supervisory control design process that merges descriptions at the level of the system architecture with specific design methods related to supervisory control synthesis. The advantages of this proposal are a better integration of the supervisory control design with other design processes and stakeholders, improving the potential to automate part of the design process, and a complete specification in a modeling language that remains independent of the particular language of code implementation.