A Mapping Method From Function To Component For The System Design Of Multi-Domain Complex Mechatronics

With the increasing complexity of multi-domain mechanics, system level design has become one of the indispensable steps in the development process of the mechanical and electrical products, In the conceptual design, preliminary design generation is the core issue of this process, that is to say, how to map system functions to the corresponding component layer, in order to achieve the automation of the design is a key problem Although there has been a summary of the design theory, methods of study, but the majority of these studies remain in the theoretical stage, there is no effective design tools to automate the design process. This paper presents a more complete set of design ideas, and automates the mapping process of the match of the conceptual design in the functional layer to structural layer.In order to achieve the knowledge capture and outline design automation solution, we firstly define a unified and standard design knowledge representation, including functional knowledge, working principle knowledge, behavior knowledge and component knowledge and established bidirectional association between them. The working principle shows the main implementation mechanism of the function, Its core attribute is the physical effects. The choice of the physical effects, will greatly affect the design in the areas and degree of innovation. The paper also proposed the concept of flow characteristic variables, and iconic properties of the entire design process, in order to automate the mapping process between functional layer and structural layer.In the knowledge base aspect, we build working principle, behavior, components, physical effects library and matching rules knowledge base to further support the automated design process. Among them, we use the component-the type of compound classification methods to build component knowledge base, this method greatly improves the retrieval efficiency of the component library.Based on the representation of knowledge and knowledge base of conceptual design, this paper presents a automate method to map between functional layer and structural layer. This method is mainly divided into three steps:direct function mapping, rule-based matching, and generation of design. Functions can be queried in the library can be directly match to the corresponding component; then adopts rule-based matching method to failed functions, and stores design results into rule base; lastly uses compatibility information to filter design results.On the basis of the above work, we use SysML language to represent the knowledge and Java language to develop a plug-in system to support mapping between function and component. Finally, we verify the function of the system using milk filling machine as design example.