Towards a Formalised Approach for Integrated Function Updates of Mechatronic Systems

摘要

Looking at different everyday products, we are facing the situation that they are replaced although their technical life time has not ended. The main reason for this is that customers often replace products like smart phones or household devices, because there are new ones available providing new and additional functions and features. These functions and features are predominately based on software and follow shorter development and innovation cycles. From the resource point of view the mismatch between technical life time and use period of products leads to great disposal. In order to address this challenge, a common concept is to update existing products. To provide substantial new functions, such updates have to concern both hardware and software components. Due to the complexity of dependencies between these components, it is not an easy task to come up with these integral and verified updates. As a first step to tackle this problem, we propose a formalized approach to describe integrated hardware and software upgrades. Based on this formalism, we present our ongoing research and preliminary results in the fields of functions and systems modeling.