SUMMARY

Cross-disciplinary integration of mechanical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering as well as recent advances in information engineering are becoming crucial factors for future collaborative design, manufacture, and maintenance of a wide range of engineering products and processes. Mechatronic systems encompass a wide range of disciplines, including mechanical and electrical engineering, and hence the development process for mechatronic system is collaborative in nature. Currently the collaborative development of mechatronic systems is inefficient and error-prone because contemporary design environments do not allow sufficient information flow of design and manufacturing data across different engineering domains. Mechatronic systems need to be designed in an integrated fashion allowing designers from multiple engineering domains to receive updates regarding design modifications throughout the design process. One approach to facilitate integrated design of mechatronic systems is to integrate mechanical with electrical engineering CAD systems. In this thesis, the information exchange between mechanical and electrical domains is explored from two perspectives: conceptual design perspective, in which constraint relationship between attributes of mechanical and electrical components is identified and classified based on the physical forms, functions, and behavior of the mechatronic system; system realization perspective, in which the identified constraints are modeled for propagation between MCAD and ECAD systems. SysML is used to model the constraints between mechanical and electrical components. By means of an illustrative example (a robot arm), the constraint modeling and propagation developed in my thesis are demonstrated and implemented utilizing a MCAD system (SolidWorks) and an ECAD system (EPLAN Electric P8).