On a Model Driven Approach to Engineering Design

An important factor for the success of today’s companies in global competition is the continuous improvement of the product development process within a product’s life-cycle. However, complex technical products affecting several engineering domains and manifold product variants lead to frequent iterations within the product development process. To decrease the development time of a product, it is therefore necessary to use appropriate software tool support and to adjust the numerous tasks in the design phase. In this paper an approach to engineering design is shown according to Model Driven Architecture that is attracting wide attention in software engineering as well as in systems engineering. Based on a central model that allows regarding the dependencies between data of different domains together, this approach uses model-to-model transformations to increase the level of detail of a product design continuously while maintaining a consistent model. The resulting model contains all necessary information to generate code for the connected programs to perform the analyses. The analysis programs return the results back into the model, giving the possibility to restart the model refinement step with a modified model. By automating this task sequence, it is possible to optimise the product design by maintaining a consistent model at the same time.