SPECIFYING THE PRINCIPLE SOLUTION OF TOMORROWS MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRODUCTS

The conceivable development of information technology will enable mechatronic systems with inherent partial intelligence. We call this kind of systems self-optimizing. The paper presents the paradigm of self-optimization and shows, in which way the principle solution of these systems, the result of the conceptual design phase, should be specified. This will be demonstrated by means of a complex component assembly, the spring and tilt module of a railway system. It is obvious that the principle solution of an intelligent mechatronic system has to be specified in a cross-domain way, before the single domains – mechanical engineering, electronics, control engineering and software engineering – start to concretize the concept in parallel.