Weaving System-Level Properties with Architectural Decomposition for Mechatronic Co-Design

As mechatronic systems become more complex, their design requires different engineering teams, each specialized in their own domain, to cooperate. This is often accomplished through a co-design process, which aims to parallelize the engineering work and therefore improve the time-efficiency and cost of system development. However, the integration step following the concurrent design often fails due to incorrect or incomplete assumptions made regarding other domains. In this paper, we propose to use a combination of two different views on the system. One view is the traditional system design methods that aim at system decomposition. The other view aims at defining the system-level properties and their interrelations. By means of a drone case study, we demonstrate how to decompose the system into manageable components, while still capturing relationships between these components and their related properties. For the drone modeling and decomposition, we use ARCADIA, whereas for the management of the cross-domain system relations, we use a knowledge model and tool that we presented in previous work.