Function-Oriented Model-Based Product Development

Abstract

The innovative strength and competitiveness of a company depends on mastering the growing complexity of digitally networked products in an efficient way. The complexity is driven by increasing interactions among the different domains, like mechanical, electrical or software engineering on all system levels. The interdependencies require modelling approaches, that allow to explicitly and transparently reveal those interdependencies on requirements, functional architectures and solution level over all phases of the development. The increasing interdependencies and the need for more efficiency forces a change from component oriented, document-based product development to a function-oriented, model-based product development with consistently linked models across all participating domains. We propose a system architecture that describes the system in a comprehensible way across domains. The domains are able to connect their models to the architecture and link them down to the parameter level over requirements, functional architecture to the solution layer. The resulting system model allows a transparent, cross-domain map** of functional interactions. Principle solution models close the gap between the functional and the solution layer, especially in mechanical engineering. The efficiency in development processes can be significantly increased by using model libraries to assign functions to solution models and by building ontologies to structure domain-specific models.