A practical approach for determination of reliability-oriented system topology in mechatronic systems

This paper focuses on mechatronic systems reliability assessment during the development process phases. Modern technical systems safety requirements are regulated by law, especially the level of safety relevant systems or components. This means it is necessary to decide at early design phase which topology or hardware suites the safety requirements of the system. Therefore the first step is to detect the system impact factors, model the system architecture, and generate a topology tree. One possibility to describe the system architecture is given by the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). From the system architecture descriptions MATLAB/Simulink models can be generated. Subsequently the next step is the realization of a reliability-oriented topology, which can be used to consider reliability-oriented aspects.