State of the art for mechatronic design concepts

Nowadays the trend toward multi-disciplinary and ever complex system development is becoming more and more essential to understand and improve engineering approaches for such systems in industrial product engineering and with that also poses questions to solve for research on about how to efficiently and successfully handle such systems development. Since the application area for the development of such systems is very broad, e.g. including automotive, aeronautics, robotics or consumer products and much more, on top the need for flexible and adaptable methods for the development of such systems arises as well. Such complex, interdisciplinary systems are also called mechatronic systems, referring to the synergistic integration of software, electronics and mechanics. To approach the complexity inherent in the discipline-spanning aspect, different development and integrations methods and techniques coming from the involved disciplines are applied. Especially the interdisciplinary aspect of mechatronics, makes it difficult to handle such development and still there is no such thing as a promoted unified mechatronic modeling and design language, which is capable of describing a joint model with sufficient details to manage the large number of involved system-aspects included in each of the representative domains-specific disciplines. In order to obtain a coherent model from the entire mechatronic system, an integrated model framework capable to manage various requirements and modeling specifications present in each discipline is needed. This paper will provide a comprehensive review regarding the evolution of design methodologies for mechatronic systems, investigate recent research approaches in the realm of model-based design, and also point out the problems and limitations inherent in the different concepts and finally summarize the most promising research directions.