Designing Tomorrow's Mechanical Engineering Products

The conceivable development of information technology will enable mechatronic systems with inherent partial intelligence. We call this kind of systems self-optimizing. Self-optimizing systems are able to react autonomously and flexibly to changing environmental conditions. They are capable of learning and optimizing their behavior at run-time. This paper presents the paradigm of self-optimization and shows, in which way the principle solution of these systems, the result of the conceptual design phase, should be specified. This will be demonstrated by means of a complex component assembly, the spring and tilt module of a railway system. It is obvious that the principle solution of an intelligent mechatronic system has to be specified in a cross-domain way, before the single domains - such as mechanical engineering, electronics, control engineering and software engineering - start to concretize the concept in parallel. This contribution was developed in the course of the Collaborative Research Center 614 "Self-Optimizing Concepts and Structures in Mechanical Engineefing" (Speaker: Prof. Gausemeier) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number SFB 614.