I’m exited to be leading the LIT SEED project CROSS-CHANGE (with Co-PIs Alexander Egyed and Alois Zoitl). The project aims to bring more insights into the question: How do Engineers Coordinate and Execute Cross-Disciplinary Changes in Software-Intensive Mechatronical Systems?
Abstract:
Designing a software-intensive mechatronic system brings together design knowledge from different engineering disciplines – with each discipline contributing its own modeling languages and mechatronic design artifacts (source code, 3D hardware models, electrical layout, etc.). A key challenge is to keep all these artifacts consistent to obtain a correct system.
While existing research started to address the issue of consistency among engineering artifacts, studying how engineers interact with mechatronic design artifacts has received little attention. Investigations into how engineers create and refine an artifact, coordinate those changes with other engineers, in what order, to achieve what task would provide novel, fundamental insights for improving design tools, especially for supporting change management. Ultimately this will lead to a reduction in friction losses among disciplines, shorter development cycles, fewer inconsistencies across artifacts, and more adaptable system designs.
The proposal’s primary aim, therefore, is to obtain a better understanding how engineers coordinate and execute cross-disciplinary changes in software-intensive mechatronical systems.
We hypothesize that such an understanding is best obtained through a two-sided approach: we propose investigations on 1) how engineers create and change mechatronical artifacts and their dependencies; and 2) how engineers coordinate their work around these artifacts: two sides of the same coin. To this end, we attempt to apply methods, techniques, and theory from software engineering in the mechatronics field and observe—as a side outcome—to what extent such a transfer is possible and useful.
Christoph Mayr-Dorn - Research 