Supporting Co-Design of Physical and Control Architectures of Mechatronic Systems
There is a rather recent tendency to define the physical structure and the control structure of a system concurrently when designing the architecture of a product, i.e., to perform codesign. We argue that co-design can only be enabled when the mutual influence between physical system and control is made evident to the designer at an early stage. Though the idea of design integration is not new, to the best of our knowledge, there is no computer tooling that explicitly supports this activity by enabling co-design as stated before. In this paper the authors propose a method for co-design of physical and control architectures as a better approach to design mechatronic systems, allowing to exploit the synergy between software and hardware and detecting certain design problems at an early stage of design. The proposed approach is supported by a set of tools and demonstrated through an example case.