A Categorical Framework for Collaborative Design of Safety Critical Mechatronic Systems

Systems engineering relies on a diversity of views of the same mechatronic system built by different design teams from several domains at different abstraction levels and using different modeling languages and tools. These views must be and remain consistent throughout the engineering process. To this end, a collaboration methodology based on a unique and formal collaborative framework is needed to connect these views while ensuring their consistency. The aim of this paper is to introduce such collaborative methodology. The category theory is chosen as formal basis to enhance collaboration between different design teams and help them maintain consistency between their corresponding models. The main objective of applying category theory in the current research is to model collaboration and consistency via interaction, transformation and synchronization, considering that all these model management scenarios can be implemented by the category theory. Moreover, our proposed methodology is mainly focused on the construction of a model that merges the different model elements according to three systems engineering aspects: requirements and constraints, behavior, and structure. To this purpose, a category based Meta-Model is established for the collaboration between systems engineering (SE) and safety assessment (SA). In this categorical framework, each model is represented by a category and, in order to link and maintain connection between these models, functors will be used. The proposed methodology was applied to a case study from the aeronautics domain, namely an Electro-Mechanical Actuator (EMA) modeled using SysML, Modelica and AltaRica languages. Therefore, the proposed collaborative methodology implemented in a categorical framework may be generalized and enhanced to take into account any other model involved in systems engineering, such as a 3D model for geometrical modeling.