Interdisciplinary System Model for Agent-based Mechatronic Design of Turbocharging Systems

The advances in technology and science lead to the creation of mechatronic systems with increasing complexity. Due to this rising complexity of the systems to be developed, the requirements towards the development processes are ascending in the same manner. As a result of the historical evolution of the involved domains (mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science), the specific IT-Tools were not designed for interdisciplinary processes and can usually even barely exchange data among each other. This causes a lack of interoperability and results in ineffective development processes with drawbacks on the consistency of interdisciplinary model data. To deal with this situation, research and industry encouraged the idea of a domain-spanning system model, which contains the cross-domain information and important relations (e. g. Chen et al. 2009). One promising approach to survey these interdisciplinary information and relations and thus help the people participating in the design process is based on multi-agent systems. The basis on which a multi-agent system is able to make decisions concerning the cross-domain information and relations can be a model of the mechatronic system modelled with the modelling language SysML. This paper will present an approach how this system models can be developed using the modelling language SysML and furthermore it will expound a practical model of a real mechatronic system – a turbocharging system for a car engine.