Hybrid UML Components for the Design of Complex Self-Optimizing Mechatronic Systems

Complex technical systems, such as mechatronic systems, can exploit the computational power available today to achieve an automatic improvement of the technical system performance at run-time by means of selfoptimization. To realize this vision appropriate means for the design of such systems are required. To support self-optimization it is not enough just to permit to alter some free parameters of the controllers. Furthermore, support for the modular reconfiguration of the internal structures of the controllers is required. Thereby it makes sense to find a representation for reconfigurable systems which includes classical, non-reconfigurable block diagrams. We therefore propose hybrid components and a related hybrid Statechart extension for the Unified Modeling Language (UML); it is to support the design of self-optimizing mechatronic systems by allowing specification of the necessary flexible reconfiguration of the system as well as of its hybrid subsystems in a modular manner.