Automatic Verification of Modeling Rules in Systems Engineering for Mechatronic Systems

Mechatronics is the close interaction of mechanics, electronics, control engineering and software engineering. The increasing complexity of mechatronic systems results in a challenging development process and particularly requires a consistent comprehension of the tasks between all the engineers involved. Especially during the early design phases, the communication and cooperation between the mechanical, electrical, control and software engineers is necessary to establish a basis for efficient and effective product development. The approach of Model-Based Systems Engineering focuses on this aspect by means of an abstract but superordinate system model. It enables a holistic view of the system. The system model can be specified using the Systems Modeling Language (SysML). The language allows many degrees of freedom to specify a fact, bearing in mind that different system architects can specify the same fact in different ways. This leads to system models that can be interpreted in many ways. Thus, these models are hard to consistently compare and interpret, resulting in communication issues. In order to tackle this problem, we present a concept that uses modeling rules supporting model comparability. We formalize them by means of checks implemented in the programming language Java and the Object Constraint Language (OCL) in order to automatically verify the system model’s compliance with these rules.