Functional analysis and modeling of complex, evolutionary grown, mechatronic products

In evolutionary grown mechatronic systems, the involved disciplines are often not sufficiently integrated. For optimization and improvement of this situation, the system and its functional dependencies are modeled. During the steps of defining objects and building up the model, the identification of functional dependencies is challenging. This contribution presents an approach to support these steps in order to improve the quality of the model. It addresses situations and systems, in which documentation and a system overview are not available adequately. Thus a modeling-scheme is developed and the elements are used to build up a Multiple Domain Matrix. The functional dependencies are derived from relations in the domains of “information” and “states”. The approach is demonstrated by an example out of industrial context.