Pragmatic Multidisciplinary Design and Information Exchange

Abstract

The challenge of managing the complexity of technical systems can only be mastered through collaboration of a multi-disciplinary team. Besides inter-personal difficulties due to different cultures, personalities, or attitudes to work, there are further, more “technical”, problems when exchanging information and data among team members. On the one hand, different backgrounds and informal system descriptions often cause misinterpretations and on the other hand, the data exchange between different engineering tools lacks standardization and automation which leads to error-prone manual updates and inconsistent data bases. However, reliable data sources are especially important for decision-making in the concept stage of the system development life-cycle because in this early stage, there are up to 85% of the overall development costs determined. Besides the application of standardized processes, the model-based design approach promises to minimize the mentioned “technical” problems of exchanging information by providing a central product model. In this presentation, the mentioned information exchange problems are illustrated together with the model-based design approach. Typical modeling languages as well as product models are categorized and their benefits and drawbacks regarding their system description and data exchange capabilities are discussed. The integrated product model “PrEMISE” is introduced which provides a pragmatic approach to solve the discussed issues and its application is presented within three use cases from different domains.