The Karlsruhe SysKIT Approach – A Three-step SysML Teaching Approach for Mechatronic Students

Abstract

Mechatronic engineers are essential joints within modern product development processes. They closely interact with the classical domains of mechanical, electrical and software engineering in order to support the design of customer oriented products of high integral functionality. Due to this, their day-to-day business in practice is strongly characterized by working with different departments and stakeholders out of different disciplines. For improving their communication and to build up a common understanding, an interdisciplinary model language is needed. The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is a language for modeling these interdisciplinary technical aspects of a system.This paper presents an educational concept for SysML focusing the students’ abilities. The concept is taught to undergraduate mechatronic students in the fifth semester. In a multidisciplinary course (mechanical, electrical and software engineering) the students have lectures, exercises and a development project. In their development project they have to use SysML for modeling – concepts, prototypes, validation and optimization. So the developed SysML workshop is at the very beginning of the semester. This approach is designed as a two day workshop. It is split into three sessions – introduction, abstract modeling and detailing. At first basic elements and modeling techniques are introduced and the students start with a guided step-by-step example. The complexity of the modeling tasks is raised during the second and third session. During the workshop the undergraduate students start with individual pen and paper modeling, followed by small modeling groups with whiteboards. To simulate the industrial environment they finally interact in teams and build up a complex model, learn how they have to change and modify their model by changing boundary conditions and generating different views targeted for stakeholder domains – simulated by a role-play. After this two day workshop the students should have learned how to model in a non-sequential approach – like in reality - and are well prepared for their development project. The usage of software tools for modeling SysML isn’t part of this workshop. Goal of this approach is to teach the understanding and application of modeling with SysML. Working in a team together at the same model is practiced as well. The concept is currently tested in a pilot study with 10 students. The modeling understanding and knowledge of these students is nearly the same as of the mechatronic students. Aim of the study is to show the comprehensibility of the SysML-teaching approach, the needed time for the whole workshop and to identify lacks in the teaching material. This paper introduces the KIT SysML teaching approach for mechatronic engineering and reflects the concept with reference to publications of comparable development methods. It further points out the differences between teaching SysML to modeling beginners and the productive usage.