Conflict Management for Mechatronic Systems Design

Due to the multidisciplinary and complex nature of mechatronic systems, collaborative design becomes necessary in order to reduce the design cycle time and cost. This collaboration involves the use of numerous languages and expert models in order to represent distinct views on the same system. Consequently, conflicts among these models are likely to happen and need to be detected and resolved carefully. In order to capture and handle these conflicts in an easy and simple way, a unifying formalism based on mathematical concepts is required. Thus, we suggest the use of Category Theory (CT), motivated by its mathematical and formal foundation to handle conflicts in a formal way. This work presents a new framework able to check and manage conflicts in collaborative design. This framework has two key features. First, to detect the conflicts between the expert models in a formal way based on category theory concepts. And second, to manage these conflicts in order to ensure the coherence of the system under design. Our approach is illustrated through its application to an Electronic Throttle Body (ETB) from the automotive industry since it involves the collaboration among several expert domains.