Multiple Engineering Domains Research Articles

Editorial

ARAI is placed at the center of critical juncture where the entire automotive industry is evolving from conventional combustion engine centered to a software centered smart mobility Industry. ARAI journal of mobility technology captures this essence of transition very clearly. The readers will indeed get a glimpse of these technologies that are built in India and across global institutions and organizations.
 As I recollect my memories of walking through the mist-covered hilltop centre of ARAI back in the 1990s for calibration of the smoke meter which was the only measuring equipment used to check and control the visible pollutants from diesel engines. Today’s ARAI has morphed itself into an institution where every modern aspect of these software-driven automotive products are created, assessed and regulated to create a sustainable future.
 Any nation's progress purely relies on the utilization of its full potential. Our capability to create products and services that fulfil the aspiration and needs of our consumers. We are the home to the software industry that designs software module or software packages that runs in machines today be it consumer appliances, automobiles, aircraft, banks, security systems, defence equipment and many more where software is an integral part of a product.
 Crystallization of ideas and products which helps individuals to move or for the general public to move in large numbers within our growing cities and in between cities is very well encompassed in this technical journal which helps researchers and engineers to visualize different products for the mobility industry.
 As a nation having the largest pool of young, qualified and highly capable engineers, the education system that propels the youth into a capable engineer with skills across multiple engineering domains is the fuel for the growth of both the component and vehicle industries. This human capital combined with the core research into components like sensors, actuators, magnetics, multiple cell chemistries, fast acting low-loss switches getting enabled through the latest communication technologies is the strength of our ecosystem to create software-defined automobiles of the future. This Journal from ARAI places a critical role in all these areas.
 The partnership between components and product creators in the automotive industry is in a transition phase through which Industry is undergoing will definitely witness a sea change in its capabilities to support and create next-gen mobility products. To identify, inform and eliminate the risk of failure on the part, every mobility product of today and in future has a vast amount of electronics and software inbuilt to effectively use such products to its fullest potential. These components will configure and change over a period of time inside these intelligent products to optimize the product performance over its lifetime.
 This journal of mobility technology and the authors of various articles herein bring great insight into every technical aspect and align leaders in the mission of creating software-centred autonomous and semi-autonomous products.
 Wishing all success to the editorial team for bringing this together and happy reading to all the readers.

Improving hardware/software interface management in systems of systems through documentation as code

ContextThe management of Interface Control Documents (ICDs) has shown to be a major pain point in the architecting processes of Systems of Systems (SoS).ObjectiveThis work aims to improve on previously identified ICD management issues using the documentation-as-code philosophy as a potential basis for a treatment, and in collaboration with practitioners.MethodWe conducted a Technical Action Research (TAR) study with a group of engineers at the Netherlands Radio Astronomy Institute (ASTRON), in the context of the LOFAR radio telescope. An additional research instrument, in the form of an expert panel, was used to evaluate the transferability of the proposed treatment to alternative domains.ResultsIn-depth insights on previously identified interface management issues were gained. Based on these insights a functional proof-of-concept was developed aimed at addressing these issues following the documentation-as-code principles. In addition to receiving overall positive reviews from practitioners and experts, further areas of improvement and transferability considerations for future work were identified.ConclusionsThe proposed approach, which to our knowledge has not been explored before in this context, is promising to address some of the recurring interfacing-related issues with directed SoS in multiple engineering domains. This could be done mainly by enforcing consistency and completeness on both text-based and formal elements of the ICDs, and turning ICDs into single sources of truth for the architecting processes of large scale SoS.

DEVS-Based Building Blocks and Architectural Patterns for Intelligent Hybrid Cyberphysical System Design

The DEVS formalism has been recognized to support generic open architectures that allow incorporating multiple engineering domains within integrated simulation models. What is missing for accelerated adoption of DEVS-based methodology for intelligent cyberphysical system design is a set of building blocks and architectural patterns that can be replicated and reused in system development. As a start in this direction, this paper offers a notional architecture for intelligent hybrid cyberphysical system design and proceeds to focus on the decision layer to consider DEVS models for basic behaviors such as choice of alternatives, perception of temporal event relations, and recognition and generation of finite state languages cast into DEVS time segments. We proceed to describe a methodology to define DEVS-based building blocks and architectural patterns for design of systems employing fast, frugal, and accurate heuristics. We identify some elements of this kind and establish their status as minimal realizations of their defined behaviors. As minimal realizations such designs must ipso facto underlie any implementation of the same cognitive behaviors. We discuss architectures drawn from the cognitive science literature to show that the fundamental elements drawn from the fast, frugal, and accurate paradigm provide insights into intelligent hybrid cyberphysical system design. We close with open questions and research needed to confirm the proposed concepts.

Monitoring and control of production processes based on key performance indicators for mechatronic systems

The processes for manufacturing and operating modern technical products require expertise in multiple disciplines like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and software engineering. Assessing the current condition and quality of these processes and the machines involved is challenging due to the inherent complexity of the products and the required expertise in multiple engineering domains. Globalization and increasing competition make it necessary to reduce production costs while at the same time ensuring high throughput and product quality. Without the ability to precisely assess the condition and quality of production processes and involved machines, taking action to steer these metrics is nearly impossible and results in unnecessary high production costs. In our previous publications, we introduced the concept of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for mechatronic systems as a concept to assess the condition and quality of products and production processes in a graspable yet substantial and efficient way.In this paper, we further refine our KPI concepts und evaluate them for two different use cases: we apply our KPI concept to a manufacturing process in the mechatronic system domain and an operation process in the food production domain. We provide detailed insights in how we applied our concepts within these domains and report about lessons learned. In addition, we provide a business case estimation for our software solution that assesses the KPIs of our food production domain example.

A Novel “Resilience Viewpoint” to aid in Engineering Resilience in Systems of Systems (SoS)

AbstractDesigning evolutionary systems to meet stakeholder expectations on safety, reliability and overall resilience is of great importance in an age of interconnectivity and high dependency systems. With incidents and disruptions becoming more frequent in recent years, the requirement for systems to demonstrate high levels of resilience given the economic, political and temporal dimensions of complexity, resilience is of great significance today. Systemic resilience is of high importance at the global level. Therefore, the role of the system engineer and architect is becoming more demanding due to the need to consider requirements from a broader range of stakeholders and to implement them into early conceptual designs. The early modeling process of all systems is common ground for most engineering projects, creating an architecture to both understand a system and to design future iterations by applying model‐based processes has become the norm. With the concept of systems‐of‐systems (SoS) becoming common language across multiple engineering domains, model‐based systems engineering techniques are evolving hand‐in‐hand to provide a paradigm to better analyse current and future SoS. The intrinsic characteristics of the constituent systems that make up the SoS make the challenge of designing and maintaining the reliability and resilience of a systems extremely difficult. This paper proposes a novel viewpoint, within an architecture framework (based around DoDAF, MoDAF and UPDM) to aid systems architects explore and design resilient SoS. This is known as the Resilience Viewpoint. Much of the research in the area is focussed on critical infrastructure (CI), looking at telecommunication networks, electric grid, supply networks etc, and little has been done on a generalizable tool for SoS architecture analysis, especially using existing modeling languages. Here, the application of the ‘Resilience Viewpoint’ is demonstrated using a case study from an integrated water supply system of systems, to portray its potential analytical capabilities.

Maintenance effort estimation with KAMP4aPS for cross-disciplinary automated PLC-based Production Systems - a collaborative approach

Automated production systems (aPSs) are often in operation for several decades. Due to a multiplicity of reasons, these assets have to be maintained and modified over the time multiple times and with respect to multiple engineering domains. An increased economic pressure demands to perform these tasks in an optimized way. Therefore, it is necessary to estimate change effects with respect to multidisciplinary interdependences, required surrounding non-functional tasks and the effort and costs included in each step. This paper outlines available cost estimation methods for PLC-based automation and Information Systems (ISs). We introduce Karlsruhe Architectural Maintainability Prediction for aPS (KAMP4aPS), an approach to estimate the necessary maintenance tasks to be performed and their related costs for the domain of aPSs by extending KAMP, which is limited to change propagation analysis on ISs. KAMP requires a metamodel to derive these tasks automatically. Unfortunately, a domain spanning metamodel is missing for aPSs. Hence, we need to develop a part of the metamodel derived from an AutomationML description for the chosen demonstrator at first. Finally, we apply and compare different estimation methods and KAMP4aPS to analyze the exchange of a fieldbus system as exemplary change scenario on a lab size plant to demonstrate the benefits of our discipline-spanning approach.

Automated generation of multiphysics simulation models to support multidisciplinary design optimization

To ensure a consistent design representation for serving multidisciplinary analysis, this research study proposes an intelligent modeling system to automatically generate multiphysics simulation models to support multidisciplinary design optimization processes by using a knowledge based engineering approach. A key element of this system is a multiphysics information model (MIM), which integrates the design and simulation knowledge from multiple engineering domains. The intelligent modeling system defines classes with attributes to represent various aspects of physical entities. Moreover, it uses functions to capture the non-physical information, such as control architecture, simulation test maneuvers and simulation procedures. The challenge of system coupling and the interactions among the disciplines are taken into account during the process of knowledge acquisition. Depending on the domain requirements, the intelligent modeling system extracts the required knowledge from the MIM and uses this first to instantiate submodels and second to construct the multiphysics simulation model by combining all submodels. The objective of this research is to reduce the time and effort for modeling complex systems and to provide a consistent and concurrent design environment to support multidisciplinary design optimization. The development of an unstable and unmanned aerial vehicle, a multirotor UAV, is selected as test case. The intelligent modeling system is demonstrated by modeling thirty-thousand multirotor UAV designs with different topologies and by ensuring the automatic development of a consistent control system dedicated for each individual design. Moreover, the resulting multiphysics simulation model of the multirotor UAV is validated by comparing with the flight data of an actual quadrotor UAV. The results show that the multiphysics simulation model matches test data well and indicate that high fidelity models can be generated with the automatic model generation process.

A holistic product design and analysis model and its application in railway vehicle systems design

For complex mechanical systems, to overcome design inconsistencies, it is becoming more and more necessary that product design system is effectively integrated with various analysis models and tools from multiple engineering domains at different design stages. In this article, a Holistic Product Design and Analysis Model, which is well supported by Top–Down design method, is conceptualized to define design and analysis integration at different levels, which will help enhance engineering design and analysis interoperability and integrate the design methods and analysis tools across multiple engineering domains. It is based on four design levels: system, subsystem, machine and component designs; at each level, design and analysis models are integrated under a Generalized Multirepresentation Architecture supporting design, analysis and optimization appropriately. For cross-level integration from top to bottom, the design models are transferred and mapped with more structural and geometric details, while analysis models obtain more detailed design constraints from the top levels. This new architecture has been developed and demonstrated with an application in a railway vehicle system design, although its optimization components have not been fully implemented. This model can be used for general mechanical product system design.

A Signal Grammar to Guide Functional Modeling of Electromechanical Products

In modern product design methodologies, designers are increasingly required to combine elements spanning multiple engineering domains, thus blurring the boundaries between engineering disciplines. Functional modeling with the Functional Basis provides the basic tools required to integrate system models at the conceptual level; however, there is a lack of unified rules to address the structure of functional models. This article covers the development of a signal grammar for functional modeling with a Functional Basis. At the conceptual level, signal flows represent the information vital to a proper system operation. Signal flows are explored through their Functional Basis lexicon and primary/carrier flow relationships. A grammar, consisting of morphology and syntax, is presented and applied to a set of electromechanical, component-based building block examples. To further demonstrate the application of signals in functional modeling, an electromechanical product is explored functionally with the application of the signal grammar.

A Distributed Decision-Support System for Virtual Prototyping

Virtual Prototyping (VP) is a data-driven design process that promotes both knowledge reuse and innovation. High-profile applications in the automotive and aerospace industries have demonstrated its potential to significantly reduce prototype cycles, time to market, and total product cost. This paper addresses VP as a specialized application of Decision-Support Systems, and discusses common requirements for engineering design tools, as well as requirements specific to the design of electronic products, such as mobile phones. Motorola Labs' test bed for VP is introduced in terms of its open, agent-based architecture utilizing Java CORBA. One of the key principles of the VP System is the reuse of expert knowledge across multiple engineering domains. This is highlighted via several use cases, showing that the system can function not only as an Intranet-accessible repository of model services but also as an integral part of decision-making within the native CAD environment.

The importance of automatic control

To ensure a consistent design representation for serving multidisciplinary analysis, this research study proposes an intelligent modeling system to automatically generate multiphysics simulation models to support multidisciplinary design optimization processes by using a knowledge based engineering approach. A key element of this system is a multiphysics information model (MIM), which integrates the design and simulation knowledge from multiple engineering domains. The intelligent modeling system defines classes with attributes to represent various aspects of physical entities. Moreover, it uses functions to capture the non-physical information, such as control architecture, simulation test maneuvers and simulation procedures. The challenge of system coupling and the interactions among the disciplines are taken into account during the process of knowledge acquisition. Depending on the domain requirements, the intelligent modeling system extracts the required knowledge from the MIM and uses this first to instantiate submodels and second to construct the multiphysics simulation model by combining all submodels. The objective of this research is to reduce the time and effort for modeling complex systems and to provide a consistent and concurrent design environment to support multidisciplinary design optimization. The development of an unstable and unmanned aerial vehicle, a multirotor UAV, is selected as test case. The intelligent modeling system is demonstrated by modeling thirty-thousand multirotor UAV designs with different topologies and by ensuring the automatic development of a consistent control system dedicated for each individual design. Moreover, the resulting multiphysics simulation model of the multirotor UAV is validated by comparing with the flight data of an actual quadrotor UAV. The results show that the multiphysics simulation model matches test data well and indicate that high fidelity models can be generated with the automatic model generation process.