Integrated Model for Dynamics and Reliability of Intelligent Mechatronic Systems

Intelligent mechatronic systems are able to autonomously adapt system behavior to current environmental conditions and to system states. To allow for such reactions, complex sensor and actuator systems as well as sophisticated information processing are required, making these systems increasingly complex. However, with the risk of increased system complexity also comes the chance to adapt system behavior based on current reliability and in turn to increase reliability. The adaptation is based on switching selecting an appropriate working point at runtime. Multiple suitable working points can be found using multi-objective optimization techniques, which require an accurate system model including system reliability. At present, modeling of system reliability is a laborious manual task performed by reliability modelling experts. Despite actual system reliability being highly dependent on system dynamics, pre-existing system dynamics models and the resulting reliability model are at best loosely coupled. To allow for closer interaction among dynamics and reliability model and to ensure these are always synchronized, advanced modeling techniques are required. Therefore, an integrated model is introduced that reduces user input to a minimum and that integrates system dynamics and system reliability.