Improving Mechatronic-system Design

The top drivers in industry today for improving development processes are shorter product-development schedules and increased customer demand for better-performing products. As engineering systems become more multidisciplinary and complex, can you simultaneously achieve these two goals?

Challenges inhibiting mechatronic-product development involve the multidomain nature of the complete system, the integration of the domains, and the discovery of errors early in the development cycle and testing before hardware is available.

Once a system is in development, correcting a problem costs 10 times as much as fixing the same problem in concept. If the vendor has released the system, it costs 100 times as much.

An innovative approach to mechatronic-system design addresses these challenges. Through system modeling and simulation, it facilitates understanding the behavior of the proposed system concept by optimizing the system-design parameters, developing local and supervisory control algorithms, testing control algorithms under various scenarios, and qualifying the production controller with a simulated version of the plant running in real time before connecting it to the real plant (Figure 1).


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The process provides an environment that is rich with numerical- and graphical-analysis and design tools that stimulate innovation and cooperation within design teams. It aims to reduce the risk of failure to meet the functional requirements by enabling early and continuous verification throughout the entire design workflow.

Author Information
Kevin C. Craig, PhD, is the Robert C Greenheck chairman of engineering design and a professor of mechanical engineering at Marquette University’s College of Engineering.