Abstract
Keywords: multifunctional system mock-up, multidisciplinary design
The traditional demands for improved performance, time-to-market and competitive price setting are strained by requirements related to product branding, personalization and ecological, safety and legislation aspects. This leads to increasingly complex products, implemented by heterogeneous technologies and more and more relying on active components and systems.
A key challenge is the inherent multidisciplinary in the design engineering, integrating thermal, hydraulic, mechanical, electronic and control functions. The corresponding test and simulation methodologies must extend beyond the traditional CAD-driven approach and support the use of system and functional models crossing the boundaries of multiple disciplines and integrating systems engineering with control engineering. These concepts will be illustrated by case studies from vehicle design engineering, demonstrating the combined use of 3D and 1D system models. It can be concluded that the research challenges for the future are hence lying both in further breakthroughs in method performance and in expanding the scope of system complexity to a truly multifunctional system mock-up.