Development of an Intelligent Design Support Tool for Integrated Design of Multidomain Systems

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"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated." Confucius. One can therefore argue that design of Mechatronic systems is a larger-than-life task and this discovery grant aims at making it a little bit simpler.***On the one hand, in order to assure their commercial success, companies need to continuously innovate. However, innovation is not always a guarantee for market success as development costs still need to be kept low and product optimality kept high. To achieve this, an integrated approach to design is preferred. ***On the other hand, Mechatronic Systems are highly challenging products to design, because of their inherent multi-physical/domain aspects, high number of components, and the complex dynamic interconnections between the different engineering domains involved in their design. Because of this complexity, the engineers still tend to tackle the design task in a sequential domain-specific manner, even though an integrated design approach is known to yield better results. ***This discovery grant research program has the long-term goal of developing a specialized user-friendly integrated design support tool to increase efficiency, reliability, and flexibility, while reducing complexity, by easing system integration. The tool would target users such as engineers, engineering students and research professionals.***The short-term objectives of this program focus on the conceptual design stage by facilitating complexity management and case studies validations. This will be achieved by reaching the following objectives:******1. Develop a method to assess the MeSys integration level during design while explicitly considering product-related dependencies. ******2. Develop an AI-based solution capable of accurate and intelligent aggregation of multi-domain design criteria that considers their relative importance and their complex interactions. (Multi-Agent System)******3. Develop a design-support software platform to facilitate the use and validation of our numerous design-support algorithms through relevant Mechatronic systems design case studies. *****