Development and Usage of a Mechatronic Design Process Model with Focus on Assumptions

Nowadays, mechatronics is included in many technical products and, furthermore, mechatronic products are necessary to fulfil a manifold of needs, wishes and requirements of customers (e.g. precision, performance and functionality). Mechatronic products offer many of these advantages, but in most cases they come at the cost of increasing complexity of the product itself and the related development and design process. Design process models can be used as a support in the design process in order to make complexity better manageable by a structured procedure. An important question is now, how project staff can deal with missing or incomplete information during the design process. Especially at the beginning and between several disciplines of the design process, the lack of information is evident in most cases, because a lot of aspects are not entirely defined in the early phases of design. Missing or incomplete information can be replaced by assumptions and this circumstance is analyzed in this paper in more detail. The management of assumptions is included in an adapted mechatronic design process model and this approach is tested with the application example of a conveyor system. In the conclusion, advantages and disadvantages of assumptions in the design process are discussed. The aims are to make design processes better manageable and to progress faster in the direction of a consistent solution.