Model-Based Generation of Software Configurations in Mechatronic Systems

Abstract

An essential part of the mechatronic system is the software, which is responsible to bring functionality into the system consisting of mechanical, electronic and electrical parts. The software must be tailored to the specific hardware to fulfill tasks (e.g. control, monitoring) according to the system requirements. In today‘s industrial practice, the design is mainly done manually. First the entire architecture is drawn using drawing tools. Based on this software developers derive the low-level specification using their low-level development environments. This is error prone and time-consuming due to the fact, that a large number of hardware parameters have to be taken in account and the informal specification does not allow to derive these parameters. To improve this we present here an approach where the overall architecture of the mechatronic system is described using a Domain-Specific Conceptual Modeling Language (DSML) using the example of Electric Vehicle Testbeds. Based on this model the low-level software configurations are generated rule-based. In this paper we present the concepts of the DSML, explain the transformation rules and show the functionality of the generator by introducing a practical example.