Challenges in Designing Mechatronic Systems

Abstract

Development of mechatronic products is traditionally carried out by several design experts from different design domains. Performing development of mechatronic products is thus greatly challenging. In order to tackle this, the critical challenges in mechatronics have to be well understood and well supported through applicable methods and tools. This paper aims at identifying the major challenges, by conducting a systematic and thorough survey of the most relevant research work in mechatronic design. Solutions proposed in literature are assessed and illustrated through a case study in order to investigate if the challenges can be handled appropriately by the methods, tools, and mindsets suggested by the mechatronic community. Using a real-world mechatronics case, the paper identifies the areas where further research is required, by showing a clear connection between the actual problems faced during the design task and the nature of the solutions currently available. From the results obtained from this research, one can conclude that although various attempts have been developed to support conceptual design of mechatronics, these attempts are still not sufficient to help in assessing the consequences of selecting between alternative conceptual solutions across multiple domains. We believe that a common language is essential in developing mechatronics, and should be evaluated based on: its capability to represent the desired views effectively, its potential to be understood by engineers from the various domains, and its effect on the efficiency of the development process.

Evolutionary layout design synthesis of an autonomous greenhouse using product-related dependencies

“…However, the selection process of the ideal algorithm to find the best range of solutions needs to be done carefully. Furthermore, the designer would still need to choose one solution among a Pareto-optimal set of solutions given by the multiobjective optimization algorithm using a posteriori approaches (Wang et al , 2017; Yu et al , 2019), which is not a trivial task as reported by Torry-Smith et al (2011) and Mørkeberg Torry-Smith et al (2012). Also, the presented algorithm rejects automatically a solution that does not respect constraints.…”

Barriers for Industrial Sensor Integration Design—An Exploratory Interview Study

“…For example, Mohebbi et al [5] review trends in concurrent, multi-criteria and optimal design of mechatronics systems and highlight that academic and industrial design challenges for mechatronics to a large extent also relate to conceptual and preliminary design stages. Another example is Torry-Smith et al [1,2] stating that a lack of sufficient attention to the [multi-disciplinary, auth.] dependencies causes integration problems and increased development cost [1].…”

“…Another example is Torry-Smith et al [1,2] stating that a lack of sufficient attention to the [multi-disciplinary, auth.] dependencies causes integration problems and increased development cost [1]. One important aspect of promising design candidates is consequently the ability to achieve robust functional performance as this reflects on the quality of the final product.…”

“…This naturally results in completely new requirements with respect to size, efficiency, and cost and thus for the integration of the mechanical, electrical and software domains. It is well accepted that the integration of multiple disciplines alone, for example in mechatronic development, adds substantial complexity and risk to design projects and organizations [1][2][3][4]. However, given the unprecedented scale of the current transition, contextual influences will result in more diversity when it comes to the experienced challenges in engineering design.…”

Potential of circular economy implementation in the mechatronics industry: An exploratory research

“…Developing methods that would facilitate the mechatronic design process and related decision making is thus an active field of research (Chouinard et al, 2017(Chouinard et al, , 2019aMohebbi et al, 2018). The main product-related challenges associated with mechatronic devices and their multi-domain nature can be summarized as such (Torry-Smith et al, 2012):…”