Design tool for mechatronic system integration modeling and analysis

“Mechatronics is an interdisciplinary technical discipline, built upon the basis of classical mechanical, electrical, controls, and electronic engineering, binding these sciences not only with one another, but also composed of computer science and software engineering.” “The field of mechatronics emerged because many technical (mechatronic) systems could hardly be improved with established methods and reasonable effort.” “The main task of a mechatronical expert is not to solve special parts of a task, but to plan the whole product design appropriately.”; As the size and complexity of Mechatronic systems increases the system design problem goes beyond the physical structures and software components. The major challenge facing the Mechatronic community in the development of next generation smart systems lies in the integration complexity of an enormous number of requirements, hardware components (sensors, actuators, smart-materials, and physical structures) and software components (soft and control algorithms) inherent in these systems. Such systems, to be effective, must integrate seamlessly into the infrastructure. Interface complexity emerges as a new kind of problem. The inherent integration complexity of these large scale mechatronic systems impacts not only system development cost and risk but also total system life cycle maintenance and support cost. Meeting this challenge has dictated the need for a fundamental change in the mechatronic design process in order to ensure affordability, reliability, maintainability, adaptability and a built-in growth potential for these large scale Mechatronic systems. The mechatronic design process now needs to focus on complexity integration issues. This challenge has also recently been stated in IEEE/ASME publications on Mechatronics.; This thesis effort was aimed at developing a design process which would make multidiscipline integration an integral part of the design process. The author has developed a Mechatronic Design Integration Tool to support the design integration process and analysis formulas to support quantitative integration analysis.