Integration of System-Level Design and Mechanical Design Models in the Development of Mechanical Systems

Abstract: Modern-day systems are becoming complex due to the growing needs of the market. These systems contain various subsystems developed by different groups of engineers. Particularly, all mechatronics systems involve different mechanical, electrical and software parts developed by multidisciplinary teams of engineers from different backgrounds. Designing of these complex systems requires effective management, of the engineering and the system integration information, across all the involved disciplines. Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) is one of the effective ways for managing the engineering design process. In MBSE, design information is formally stored in the form of models, which allows better control of requirements throughout the development life cycle and provides ability to perform better analysis. Engineers usually are expert in their own discipline, where they utilize modeling languages and tools with a domain-specific focus. This creation of models with the domain-specific focus does not provide a view of the system as a whole. Hence, in order to have a complete system view, it is required to provide information transfer means across different domains, through models developed in different modeling languages and tools supporting them. Model integration is one of the ways to integrate and transfer model information across different domains. An approach for model integration is proposed, with the focus on the integration between system level models created in SysML and mechanical CAD (MCAD) models. The approach utilizes the feature of SysML to create domain specific profiles and presents a SysML profile for MCAD domain. This profile aids in establishing a mapping between SysML and MCAD concepts, as it allows the extension of SysML constructs to represent MCAD concepts in SysML. Model transformations are used to transform a model created through SysML profile for MCAD in to the corresponding model in a MCAD tool, and vice versa. A robot model is presented to exemplify the working of the approach and to explain the integration of mechanical design model with a system-level design model and vice versa. The approach presented in this thesis depicts a scalable concept, which can be extended towards the integration of other domains with MCAD, by building new relations and profiles in SysML. This approach aids in co-evolution of a system model during domain-specific development activities, hence providing better means to understand the system as a whole.