Functional and Logical Structures: A Systems Engineering Approach 2011-01-0517
Mechatronics development continues to be a challenge for automotive OEM's and suppliers. Multi-disciplinary collaboration and development is critical, especially as architectures and solutions evolve in the automotive industry to satisfy changing needs of the customer and environment. New approaches to mobility, sustainment, and infotainment create the need for new combinations of electrical, software, mechanical, and chemical know-how.
Whereas most frameworks for requirements-driven model-based design support a single discipline, what is really needed is a framework for requirements-driven model- based design that can capture the multi-disciplinary architecture of the vehicle or system. This would and allow development organizations to then further decompose the objects in support of further refinement and validation. This means that the Requirement, Functional, Logical, and Physical (RFLP) approach must be applicable at the highest level of vehicle architectural development as well as the lowest level of technical decomposition.
Our approach on the topic of “Vehicle Architecture” is to show how RFLP can be used to define and refine vehicle definition and concepts even when the requirements may be somewhat “high-level.” With RFLP, vehicle architects can capture the “voice of the customer requirements” and use them to frame decisions at the highest level of the product definition, providing needed context for lower level decisions and analysis.
