Mechatronics & the Importance of PLM
A rapidly growing number of traditionally mechanical products now depend on software-driven electronics to make them work. The blending of designs to include these different components is often called “mechatronics”—the synergistic combination of mechanical, electronic and software engineering. Clearly and unmistakably, mechatronics is becoming an integral part of product design for a wide range of products, and companies need to find better ways to support it.
Compelling benefits are driving this growing trend toward mechatronics. In many products, software-driven electronics enable new and advanced capabilities not previously feasible in totally mechanical designs. Moreover, electronic controls give manufacturers tremendous cost benefits, since duplicating software is much less expensive than building the same feature in a mechanical part.
A growing number of manufacturers are finding that production costs also can be lowered by using the same mechanical configuration for various models of a product line but shipping them with different controlling software. In these cases, embedded software is rapidly becoming a key differentiator between competitive products, which otherwise may be mechanically indistinguishable. Additionally, embedded software allows particular features to be programmed into a product just before delivery to the end customer (such as the language to be displayed for the user), giving manufacturers considerable flexibility in customizing the same product for different markets and regions. Thus, unless there is a particular requirement that prohibits the use of electronics—low production volumes or hostile operating environments, for example—replacing mechanical assemblies and parts with software often makes sense from a business perspective.
Software is being embedded in a growing number of other products formerly regarded as strictly electromechanical including automobiles, machine tools, industrial machinery, plant controls, agricultural equipment, home appliances, toys and games, and even hand tools. Automobiles, in particular, are increasingly utilizing software-driven electronics to provide a wide range of capabilities such as advanced safety features, diagnostics, engine control, and other functionality that was not even feasible until recently. The trend is so pronounced that newer automobiles are often characterized as “computers on wheels.” This thinking begins to illustrate the tremendous change occurring across industries as companies struggle to accommodate major changes in the ways their products are designed, produced, and supported due to the incorporation of electronics and software as a fundamental part of the product.
Obstacles to Overcome
Although tremendous opportunities are possible, incorporating mechatronics into product design usually isn’t easy. At the center of many of these problems is the lack of standards across mechatronics design and deployment processes. Traditionally, the environments used to support development of mechanical, electronic, and software components and products are completely separate, utilizing different protocols. These include Mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD), Electronic Design Automation (EDA), and Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools. These different categories of systems often do not support reasonable exchange of data among one another. This lack of integration standards not only increases the time required for product development but also may inject errors into the manufacturing and support processes. Additionally, simulation technologies often cannot account for mechanical, electronic, and software behavior to fully evaluate overall product performance in a single virtual model that integrates all these disciplines.
Some of the greatest impediments to success with mechatronics are organizational in nature. Most companies are organized for the different disciplines to work independently, typically functioning in isolation from one another and passing project information from one group to another in serial fashion. Disciplines generally work in silos with their own individual design systems and processes. As a result, engineers downstream in development have little opportunity to provide valuable input early in the cycle, and design deficiencies often are not uncovered until late in the process when changes are costly and time-consuming.
Multidisciplinary Collaboration NeededBy necessity, mechatronics requires a holistic approach in which managers are focused on the product in its totality and design teams become more integrated. Members in different disciplines must work in parallel and more collaboratively so problems are circumvented up front in development, product design is optimized, development time is shortened, and innovation is encouraged. One of the biggest challenges to this approach is developing appropriate work processes that accommodate the nuances and intricacies of the different design fields in a single coherent program. This demands an overall “systems engineering” approach.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) addresses these issues by creating a virtual “big room” where multidisciplinary teams can collaborate and where cross-functional visibility allows for the management of a total design program. CIMdata defines PLM as a strategic business approach that applies a consistent set of business solutions to support the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product definition information across the extended enterprise from concept to end-of-life, integrating people, processes, business systems, and information.
A wide range of capabilities and functionality provided by PLM can be applied in supporting mechatronics product development. High on the list is the ability of PLM to integrate the process and product design tools into the mechatronics process. Specifically, MCAD, EDA and CASE software can be integrated into a common PLM design environment. Since mechatronics is the integration of these three engineering disciplines, PLM functions become a key enabler of mechatronics design processes. The user interfaces of the design tools now allow the designer to easily check-out and check-in appropriate design components from the enterprise PLM application.
Furthermore, by providing one place to store all the design data and to maintain integrated configuration control, PLM offers a “single source of truth” for everyone on the mechatronics design team. This overcomes the problem of engineers not openly sharing their intermediate designs between disciplines, thus resulting in significant errors and delays from others proceeding with their tasks based on out-of-date information. The recommended process is to have each functional team use a common PLM environment as the work-in-process shared repository. While this promotes a timely deployment of the integrated design, it also guarantees that the version and configuration of the mechatronics components and end product are universally understood. Most importantly, this allows cross-functional teams to iterate mechatronics designs. For example, as an electrical component is changed by an electrical designer, the change is available to the mechanical designer.
To support close collaboration between the different disciplines in mechatronics development, PLM serves as a product information backbone where all of the design stakeholders may use reliable information for simulating the design of the products or processes. Simulation vendors are beginning to provide tools that integrate mechanical, electrical and control processes. The only way these applications can work reliably is if all of the data (with the correct revisions) are maintained. This allows for real-time access of the design worldwide and provides a way for all of the mechatronics stakeholders to participate: supply chain partners, service providers and contractors inside and outside the firewall. Most importantly, unique domain expertise is available to the total integrated development team.
PLM also facilitates the mechatronics development process by supporting the execution of the required product life cycle steps across all design disciplines in industries such as automotive, aerospace, nuclear, and medical, where stringent design protocols must be followed. Furthermore, it provides an audit that all steps have been completed. In this way, PLM guarantees that reliable and timely new product builds will be executed. Such capabilities are especially valuable to supply chain managers who need to ensure that all intellectual property of the product is available in time for planning, engineering, and procurement processes.
Throughout the mechatronics development process, PLM maintains an integrated view of new-product features and specifications from customers. Otherwise, this overall perspective is often dispersed and details are lost as the information is parsed out to individual engineering disciplines, leaving no way for issues within the engineering disciplines to be traced back to customer problems. PLM helps overcome this difficulty by maintaining individual views for mechanical, electrical, and software engineers while managing a global, integrated view of customer requirements and issues. In this way, portfolio tracking, project and program management become integrated across all disciplines when they are managed in a PLM application.
