Integrated design framework: Towards an approach for early design

Making the mechatronics product development process more efficient is a key point for companies, researchers in the field of Design Theory and Methodology or teachers in Mechanical Engineering. In the early design stages, this sort of products requires an integrated framework that helps designers of each domain to have a clear view of the functions, behaviors or structures of the entire system. It also helps them to be early informed of the choices about the different conceptual or architectural solutions that affect their future performance. In the literature and in most curricula, presentations of design methodologies or models are still based on specific viewpoints. In that way, there is still a lack of a global or integrated framework. Consequently, the development of such a framework is important. The joint engineering curriculum with novel learning aids presented in this paper tries to satisfy these needs. The design approach proposed will be applied in a real joint engineering study process. This development is the result of cooperation between five European universities of technology. In this paper, we present our initial attempt to combine coherently SysML for modeling purpose and Dimensional Analysis Theory for early comparison, simulation and evaluation of the proposed design solutions. The introduction to the context of mechatronics product development process naturally leads us to summarizing the fundamental aspects of SysML and Dimensional Analysis. We then articulate coherently these two approaches. as a conclusion we underline the necessity of future development of the SysML language to include tools dedicated to evaluation, comparison and simulation.