Enhancing Mechatronic Product Development by Integrating MBSE and PLM

The idea seems compelling: Having all relevant dependencies at your fingertips during the development of a product and visualizing them for everyone involved in order to be able to make decisions in a timely, fast and and informed manner.  This is the promise of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).

But why should we want to introduce yet another level of abstraction to a product’s representation when the creation of a digital twin is already difficult enough?  The answer emphasizes the value of MBSE and PLM integration in three parts:

1. A model in the sense of the above-mentioned proposition does not really introduce an additional level
   Why? Because even without using a model, all relevant information needs to be collected to support product related decisions – usually this information is held in “invisible systems” such as Excel – which at best only represents just a snapshot, albeit created with considerable effort.
2. A model is a data type of a higher level of abstraction
   While requirements, functions and product structure are linked together in a model, this link is both bidirectional and dynamic and – most importantly – it is linked with design intent. What does that mean? A requirement is not simply linked to a specific function (or group of functions), but contains a statement: the requirement is the basis of a function (i.e. conversely: no function without an associated requirement) and the function fulfils the requirement: this semantic relationship, the linking of meaning between elements, is a consistent feature of the model.
3. Models enhance decision-making agility
   Anyone who is faced with product decisions also needs to know the alternatives and the possible impact of that decision. Has the customer changed the requirement? Which functions of the product will be affected? Which components need to be “touched”? What engineering effort will this entail? Models can provide instant answers to these questions.

In addition, models also include other relevant decision-making aspects that can are difficult to be represented in conventional systems, such as risks and concerns  as well as the verification and validation requirements and tasks assigned to the requirements.

The Combination of MBSE and PLM Integration Enables an “Authoritative Source of Truth”

As a result, a model contains everything you need to control your product from one source. For this reason, system engineers often speak of their models as the “authoritative source of truth”, which sounds very similar to the claim of the PLM world. However, as we will see in a moment, it is something completely different.

However, apart from possibly competing claims to the authority of the respective methodologies, the increasing acceptance of model-based development raises the question of how PLM systems and MBSE work together and how they can be integrated. To answer this question, we need to take a step back and take a brief excursion into the history of engineering data management.

Today’s engineering data management systems have historically evolved from the first engineering data management systems of the 1980s. These first systems were barely more than file management systems with workflow capabilities and rights management. They were document-oriented.

However, with the advent of complex 3D CAD systems in development, this document-based approach proved no longer sufficient. The emerging PLM systems had to be able to handle the native data structures of the respective CAD systems in order to provide the necessary level of detail. These systems were structure list-oriented.

This new generation of system was able to link structure lists from M-CAD and E-CAD systems for the first time, laying the foundation for electromechanical data models.

Linked Data Structures: A Game Changer in Electro Mechanical Product Development

Models similarly link data structures, such as requirements, functions and the product structure. The difference to PLM systems resides in the semantic quality of these links. So what does that mean? Every relationship has a purpose. This purpose is unique and characterizes how the elements of a model interact and how they relate to each other. This creates a data model of a higher level of quality than tree or list structures can offer.

Anyone who has dealt with data integration knows that unambiguous relationships can only be established if the data structures are similar. Data with very different structures can either not be linked at all, or only with great difficulty, or only at a high level. So how do you get a round peg into a square hole?

How MBSE Models Feed and Enhance PLM Systems

The answer is easier than you might think. If we assume for a moment that a model actually contains all the relevant decision-making information for a product in a linked structure, then we quickly realize that this model can “feed” other systems very well: The requirements that are incorporated in the model typically originate from a requirements management system.

Requirements management in turn will benefit from “enriched” information from the model, e.g. the validation and verification requirements linked to the requirements and their associated parameters.

A similar approach can be applied to the product structure. However, there is one major difference: the product structure consists of various individual elements from the development domains: mechanical, electronic and software. Each of these development disciplines has its own data models due to its specific development methodology and therefore its own domain data management (DDM).

Shared MBSE and PLM Models for Development

As each domain data management systems understands the data structures of its own domain and the respective design data is also managed in it there in a federated manner, they do not have to be tied together in a PLM system with a lot of effort.

The context of the overall product is already created in the model, as all elements of the product structure related to the function to they contribute. In this sense, the functional structure of the model has the effect of a common denominator of mechatronic product development.

In such a scenario, a PLM system still plays an important role as the backbone and pacesetter of the development process. However, the cumbersome integration challenge has at least been partially resolved by adopting a model-based approach.

In our webinar, you can learn more about the possibilities offered by model-based development using the MBSE software GENESYS for the definition, clarification and implementation of complex requirements catalogs.

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