Towards an integrated approach to systems design

The manufacturing of intelligent mechanical systems involves the integration of a set of heterogeneous components. The complexity of these systems arises from the nature of interaction between software, hardware, and mechanical components, which imposes various physical, functional, performance, and timing constraints. Several design approaches are distinctively practiced for modeling software-intensive, hardware-intensive, or mechanical systems. Developing a system design approach that integrates these heterogeneous paradigms is a challenge. In this paper, we identify fundamental issues and challenges in developing a component-based integrated engineering design approach. We classify issues under specification, verification, design, and reusability categories. We identify the properties of the necessary specification models such as genericity, formality, and consistency. Verification issues include integration constraints and other functional and performance aspects. Design issues include architectures of heterogeneous components, hardware/software codesign, and design metrics. Finally, we identify reusability issues as related to building manufacturing systems from reusable, highly generic, and highly parameterized components. We then describe our research approach to address these issues. By establishing a foundation for an integrated system design approach, we consequently improve our ability to specify, model, and verify effective intelligent manufacturable systems as well as develop tools to support integrated system designs.