Course: COMP 762B – Modeling And Simulation

Topic: Reading/Presentation project

Selected Paper: TOWARDS A MULTI-VIEW MODELLING ENVIRONMENT FOR MECHATRONICS SYSTEMS

Source: Multi-View Modelling Environment for Mechatronics Systems.pdf

Abstract

The development of modern technical systems requires the close collaboration of various specialist teams and engineering disciplines. Even though working with the same system towards the same goal, developers from the different domains use their own specific tools, providing their own specific views of the system to be developed. For the successful integration of the efforts from each of these disciplines, the different views need to be appropriately integrated, preventing any inconsistencies and divergences from creeping into the system design. In this report, we present an approach to multi-view modeling which systematically integrates the two generally accepted complexity reduction techniques of hierarchical decomposition and multi-viewing. While these techniques are common practice in many modern design tools, the approach presented defines how the inter-view relationships can be used to tightly interweave the views’ hierarchies.

Through the use of a case study, model integration is investigated for the allocation of system functions onto the implementing hardware architecture. The resulting approach maintains the principle of hierarchical design within, as well as between the views, where allocation can be performed at arbitrary levels across the hardware and function hierarchies. The proposed approach promotes the independent development of the views, allowing developers from each discipline to work concurrently, yet providing support for a holistic view.

This provides a good basis for an information-sharing environment enabling model-based, multi-disciplinary development. While specific to the allocation of system functions to hardware, these mechanisms can be reused for the mapping of system functionality to the software architecture, or software to hardware allocation. The generalization of this work to cover other kinds of relations remains a challenge for future work.