A requirement-driven architecture definition approach for conceptual design of mechatronic systems

Designers specify design requirements and determine the interconnections between the design requirements and main components of the system architecture during the conceptual design phase. To define the architecture of a mechatronic system, two research issues, namely system decomposition and component selection, should receive special attention. However, the manner in which to realise system decomposition and component selection by using the requirement specification results, to achieve an appropriate system architecture, has seldom been investigated in existing studies. Therefore, the authors present a requirement-driven architecture definition approach to solve the system decomposition and component selection problems. A well-formulated specification of design requirements is proposed, which classifies design requirements into functional and nonfunctional requirements. Moreover, a decomposition method based on the functional requirements is presented to help designers realise system decomposition, while a component selection method based on the non-functional requirements is proposed to help designers select the most suitable components. The lunar roving vehicle and automated ceramic matrix composite materials cutting system are selected as two case studies to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach in both the academic and industrial domains.