The implementation of the SBCE principles in the V-cycle steps for the development of a mechatronic product and its production system

The immense integration of electronics, control and software into mechanics has led to considerable technological progress in many sectors like transportation, robotics, aerospace and medicine. Consequently, designing new modern technical products has become costly as well as time-consuming due to the complexity of these products which can bring about frequent design modifications emerging at different design stages of a newly-developed product; hence creating iterative exchange loops among various domains staff. The increase in price and time may not meet the customers’ interests and boosts international competition between companies which have always looked for speeding up technological innovation, shortening products life cycle and satisfying customers’ expectations in terms of price and quality through mainly adjusting their production systems to speedy, continuous and unexpected changes in customer needs. Thus, production constraints should be incorporated in the early design process phases of a multidisciplinary complex system. Besides, the product as well as the management of the production system need to be concurrently optimized. In this paper, we aim at developing a new approach to decrease the iterative exchange loops and, thus, time and cost and also to improve the quality and the performance of a new mechatronic product. Therefore, we put forward a new approach in which we integrate the SBCE principles into the system engineering approach steps and apply the same principles for the production system development which is to be treated in earlier design steps. The implementation of this approach was performed in a software framework prototype using Python language. Finally, our new method is validated through a case study in the automotive domain. In fact, an Electronic Throttle Body was used for the illustration and validation of this current approach which is meant to help complex system designers to integrate production constraints into preliminary design steps as well as find the most convenient solutions that can enable them avoid heavy costs in the production system.