Mechatronic system design with manufacturing constraints using set-based concurrent engineering

Mechatronics expresses the close integration of mechanics, electrics/electronics, control engineering and software engineering. The design of mechatronic systems follows the traditional point-based design method, which drawback is the decrease of the potential of innovation, by limiting the design space to few solutions. The Set-Based Concurrent Engineering SBCE, however, begins by broadly considering sets of possible solutions and gradually narrowing the set of possibilities to converge on a final solution. Nevertheless, few industrials in the mechatronic field are using SBCE concept, because of the difficulty to implement it. In this paper, we show how to apply the SBCE concept for mechatronic systems, with an application to an industrial case study of an Electronic Throttle Body (ETB), used to regulate the amount of air in an internal combustion engine. The results show that with a well-structured SBCE process model, we can explore the big number of solutions that we generate when dealing with mechatronic systems, and then we progressively reduce the set of possibilities to the final system design.