Mechatronic engineering as one facet of CAPE

The engineering process for railway vehicles comprises a broad variety of different domain expertise - control system, electrical and mechanical engineering. All of these domains are complex by themselves and most of the existing manufacturers are really satisfied having one domain sufficiently supported. One of the successful attempts is Adtranz's CAPE/C (Computer Aided Project Engineering for Control Systems) environment [[!]]. Having such an environment in mind we at ABB Corporate Research have started investigations on traction control engineering which comprises the electrical and mechanical engineering domain. In this paper we present our approach and developed tool support for a closed loop engineering process for development of traction control algorithms, which are validated and refined through mechanical design and simulation. Both domains are using analytical or programmed system representations realised in the control platform Matlab/SIMULINK and the mechanical platform ADAMS. They are integrated to work seamlessly together and represent the first step to an integrated electrical engineering environment we have in mind. We conclude this paper with a presentation vision environment where we give some insights about the integration basics and give an outlook of how the co-operation of specific tasks of electrical engineering domain could collaborate with other engineering tasks of railway construction.