Functional driven product development using MBSE

Abstract

In this digitalization era, manufacturing companies are shifting towards automation in order to catch up with the technology needs of industry 4.0. To achieve a smart factory, it requires solving challenges from different domains. The research work focuses on identifying the challenges faced in the existing product development and provides recommendation upon overcoming the challenges by implementing MBSE in practise [1]. The Project was a collaboration between China Euro Vehicle Technology (CEVT) and Chalmers university of Technology. The existing product development activities are carried out in a traditional way which is the document-based activities. The Thesis aims to investigate and provide recommendations about the model-based system engineering approach. The research work is divided into different phases, where, the first phase focused on understanding the model-based system engineering (MBSE) methodology and the barriers in the exiting product development process. To further understand the problems, several interviews has been held with the stakeholders. The barriers identified played a major role in defining the use case in the later stage of the research work. The second phase focuses on investigating the MBSE tool i.e., Capella. This phase deals with understanding the architecture behind the modelling techniques in Capella. ARCADIA is the system engineering method which utilizes models with a collaborative, evaluation and exploitation of the architecture. The different stages of the architecture are analysed and the operations performed on each stage are documented. The third phase of the thesis work focuses on performing the product modelling in the MBSE tool. In order to perform the modelling, rear view door mirror subsystem has been chosen as a system of reference. The different model elements corresponding to the Door mirror components are modelled in Capella and the tracelinks are established. In order to implement the requirement integration with the models, System Modeling Workbench (SMW) platform provided by Siemens is utilized. SMW interface is a replica of Capella with some additional integration features. The final phase is to verify MBSE and the model elements against the use cases. A number of product development activities are defined in the form of use cases and its implementations are discussed. The MBSE platform is validated against the use cases and the results are captured. The outcome of the research work is the Proof of concept in SMW for Teamcenter which attempts to eliminate the barriers identified in the existing PD processes. The thesis work concludes with the list of benefits upon implementing MBSE and highlights the changes in the development process from the existing product development process in practise. It also provides certain guidelines and best practise methods to be followed upon implementation of MBSE in a project.