
PublicationSep 11, 2023
Quality assurance of digital twins: an experience report in the automotive industry
Digital twins are becoming increasingly important for the efficient and effective development and operation of cyber-physical systems. However, digital twins are only useful if they reflect the real-world system accurately enough, i.e. their quality is high enough. This claim entails the question, of what the term quality in the context of digital twins means and how it can be measured. In this article, the authors presented their experience with the quality assurance of a digital twin for an assembly line in the automotive industry. Authors explained the preliminary definition of digital twin quality, which authors derived from classical quality models for general software systems. Furthermore, authors described quality issues, which they were able to detect in a digital twin of an assembly line in the automotive industry. Finally, authors concluded how to leverage their experience in different contexts and how to generalize the …
ProjectJul 31, 2024
Spatial Systems IDE: Mechatronic 3D Modeling
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for spatio-temporal mechatronic systems enabling component-based 3D modeling across mechanics and electronics.
PublicationMay 20, 2024
Learnings from developing a custom virtual assembly environment for mountability issues of cooling cabinets
Various industries use computer simulation for verifying product properties in early phases of development. Traditionally, such properties include the stability of mechanical structures or the efficiency of aircraft turbines. More recently, research also focuses on the mountability of industrial products using virtual assembly. While research on virtual assembly already started in the mid-1990s, the applicability in different industries remains largely unclear today. To advance the state-of-the-art, in this paper we present learnings from developing a virtual assembly environment for cooling cabinets.
PublicationJul 24, 2023
GITHUB FOR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT-HOW COULD THAT LOOK LIKE?
Product development is facing new challenges due to increasingly complex and individualized products in small batch sizes and short time to markets at high quality standards. Integrated product data management along with systematic requirements engineering and early stakeholder involvement are known to be key enablers for the success of future product development. In software development, established platforms such as GitHub exist, which have been shown to improve stakeholder communication, requirements elicitation, and software design decisions. In product development, similar platforms exist with impressive functionality, but which have some drawbacks such as closed source licenses, vendor-specific data formats, and expert-level user interfaces. To overcome the current situation, we study how the ideas of GitHub can be translated to an open source solution for product development and which …
PublicationNov 14, 2018
Test-driven conceptual design of cyber-physical manufacturing systems
Today, manufacturing system engineering companies face three major trends: First, the systems have to implement more functions and, hence, grow in complexity. Then, besides mechanical engineering discipline the electrical and software engineering disciplines contribute more and more to the functionality of the system and, hence, require increasing efforts. And finally, the integration of the components from the individual engineering disciplines has become a costly task taking up to 25% of the p...»
PublicationJul 21, 2014
A Rapid Prototyping Approach for Smart Energy Systems Based on Partial System Models
A key success factor for building smart control software for today's energy systems is a precise understanding of their behavioral requirements. However, current engineering approaches lack the possibility to validate these requirements in early phases of development. The validation is hampered by the difficulty estimating the impact of requirements on the overall system behavior before a complete system model is built. To overcome this situation, we propose a model-based rapid prototyping approach based on partial system models enabling early validation of behavioral requirements through tool-supported behavior estimation. For evaluating the approach we demonstrate our approach through a case study showing the interaction between customer and software engineer over three iterations. Finally, the approach is discussed with respect to modeling effort and required model resolution.