A Lightweight Approach to Manage Engineering Parameters in Mechatronic Design Processes.

In mechatronic design processes the exchange of information between stakeholders from different disciplines is essential to enable simultaneous engineering and a successful integration of domain specific subsystems. Although there is a comprehensive range of methodologies and tools to support collaboration, intentions to implement a central data management platform covering all stakeholders often do not succeed. Reasons are the heterogeneous model landscape, the variety of stand-alone authoring tools, departments’, disciplines’ or companies’ boundaries and a lack of flexibility of established solutions regarding the support of unpredictable and quickly changing design processes. This paper focuses on the management of individual parameters and parameter instances (values) within a multi-disciplinary development team. The presented lightweight approach can extend existing methods and data management infrastructure by adding functionalities to provide access to individual parameters using a dedicated database. The procedure is shown by the example of a technical mechanism.