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

“生活真的很简单，但我们坚持让它变得复杂。”——孔子。因此，人们可以争辩说，机电系统的设计是一个比生命更重要的任务，这项发现资助的目的是使它变得简单一点。一方面，为了保证商业上的成功，公司需要不断创新。然而，创新并不总是市场成功的保证，因为开发成本仍然需要保持低水平，产品的最优性仍然需要保持高水平。要做到这一点，最好采用综合的设计方法。另一方面，机电一体化系统是一种极具挑战性的产品，因为其固有的多物理/领域方面，大量的组件，以及不同工程领域之间复杂的动态互连。由于这种复杂性，工程师仍然倾向于以顺序的特定领域的方式处理设计任务，即使已知集成的设计方法可以产生更好的结果。该发现研究项目的长期目标是开发一种专门的用户友好型集成设计支持工具，以提高效率、可靠性和灵活性，同时通过简化系统集成降低复杂性。该工具将针对工程师、工程专业学生和研究专业人士等用户。该计划的短期目标集中在概念设计阶段，通过促进复杂性管理和案例研究验证。这将通过实现以下目标来实现：在明确考虑产品相关依赖的同时，开发一种在设计期间评估MeSys集成级别的方法。2. 开发一个基于人工智能的解决方案，能够准确和智能地聚合多领域设计标准，考虑它们的相对重要性和它们之间复杂的相互作用。（多智能体系统）开发一个设计支持软件平台，通过相关的机电系统设计案例研究，促进我们众多设计支持算法的使用和验证。

"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.