Software-physical synergetic design methodology of mechatronic systems based on formal functional models

Mechatronic systems are the synergetic integration of software and physical parts whose characteristics are quite different. The synergistic design of these two parts is one of the main challenges of the system design of mechatronic systems. Although with divergent characteristics, these two parts are possible to be unified on the functional level. Motivated by this observation, a formal functional representation is proposed by extending the flow-based functional representation. On this basis, a system design methodology is proposed, according to which the software and physical parts can be designed separately by applying specific design methods and interactions between the two design processes can be enabled to help designers to identify design defects and constraints in early design. Following this methodology, the traditional reference architecture of mechatronic systems is refactored so that software and physical parts can be correlated in fine granularity. A mobile robot is illustrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.