Management of Cross-Domain Model Consistency during the Development of Advanced Mechatronic Systems
Year: 2009
Editor: Norell Bergendahl, M.; Grimheden, M.; Leifer, L.; Skogstad, P.; Lindemann, U.
Author: Gausemeier, Jürgen; Schäfer, Wilhelm; Greenyer, Joel; Kahl, Sascha; Pook, Sebastian; Rieke, Jan
Series: ICED
Section: Design Methods and Tools
Page(s): 1-12
Abstract
The development of mechatronic systems demands the close collaboration of engineers from different domains. In the course of the development, this leads to the creation of a number of separate, but interdependent models which capture the domain-specific system aspects. Without harmonizing the domain-specific development processes, inconsistencies between the domain-specific models are likely to occur. If these inconsistencies remain undetected, the system integration will fail, which is leading to increased development time and costs. As a first step to prevent these problems, we propose a cross-domain system specification in the early conceptual design phase. Furthermore, as the novel contribution of this paper, we show how model transformation techniques can be employed to, firstly, derive initial domain-specific models for the subsequent domain-specific development and, secondly, to propagate domain-spanning relevant changes that may occur between those models. We show how the domain-spanning relevance of changes may be detected automatically and we discuss where expert decisions are indispensable. We implemented the approach in our development environment.
Keywords: consistency management, domain-spanning system specification, domain-specific models, model transformation, automated change propagation