INTERDISCIPLINARY SYSTEM MODEL FOR AGENT-SUPPORTED MECHATRONIC DESIGN
Year: 2011
Editor: Culley, S.J.; Hicks, B.J.; McAloone, T.C.; Howard, T.J. & Lindemann, U.
Author: Stetter, Ralf; Seemüller, Holger; Chami, Mohammad; Voos, Holger
Series: ICED
Section: Product and Systems Design
Page(s): 100-111
Abstract
Today mechatronic design usually suffers from a lack of domain-spanning IT-support. Commonly, each discipline is using its specific IT-tools and data formats and the abundance of logical connections between the disciplines is only present in the designer’s minds or in unstructured documents such as MS Word or MS PowerPoint files. Many approaches to unify the tools and data during the last two decades were made but have not made their way into the product development departments in industrial practice. One approach to document and use the connections between the disciplines are agent based systems. Such systems use independent software entities representing either components of the product to be developed or certain process segments which interact in a system called agent system. Due to their flexibility and the ability to achieve solutions which satisfy multiple objectives such systems are a promising approach to address the challenges of mechatronic design. However, the application of such systems requires the documentation of the interdisciplinary connections in an interdisciplinary system model. In this paper SysML is proposed for this specific task and is applied to a product.
Keywords: SYSML; MECHATRONIC DESIGN; INTERDISCIPLINARY SYSTEMS; AGENT-BASED SYSTEM