ABSTRACT This paper presents a unified approach based on utilizing multidimensional arrays in order to model the  physical and logical properties of mechatronics systems.  A mechatronics system model consists of two  interacting submodels.A submodel that describes aspects related to energy flow  in the physical system, and another submodel that describes aspects related to information  flow  in  the  control system. The multidimensional array based approach  of modelling provides us with the possibility to use one terminology and the same formalism for modelling both subsystems. The  consequence of using the same formalism is that simulation of the mechatronics system can be performed using only one simulation environment58302

Keywords: Mechatronics, System, Modelling

1.  INTRODUCTION 

Mechatronics  system  is defined as  the synergetic integration of  mechanical engineering with  electronics, and  intelligent computer  control in  the  design  and manufacturing of  industrial products  and processes [5].  The  components of mechatronics systems  must  be  designed concurrently,  that  is,  the  constraints imposed on  the system  by  each discipline must be considered at the very early stages. Therefore, proper system design will depend heavily on  the  use of  modelling  and simulation throughout  the  design and prototyping stages. The  integration within a  mechatronics system is performed  through  the combination of the hardware components resulting in a physical system and  through the integration of the information processing system resulting  in an  intelligent control system [7]. 

The mechatronics system then, is  the  result  of  applying  computer  based control systems to physical  systems. The  control  system  is designed  to  execute commands in  real time in order  to select, enhance, and supervise the behavior of the physical system. The  only  possible way  to guarantee that  these  control functions  will keep the behavior  of  the whole  system within certain boundaries before we actually build it, is to create  a model of  the  real system that takes  into  account  all  the imposed constraints  by both the  hardware and software components. This implies that a model of the real system must be powerful enough  to  capture  all  the properties  of mechatronics system. That includes; the dynamic, static, discrete event, logic, as well as cost related properties of the real system, a  task  we  believe,  defies  any  fragmented approach of modelling. In this paper we  present a unified approach for  modelling  mechatronics  systems. This unified approach utilizes geometric objects or  multidimensional arrays to formulate models  of  mechatronics systems.  The multidimensional array based approach  of modelling provides us with the possibility to use the same formalism for a large variety of systems  [2,3,4,9]. The  consequence  of using the same formalism is that simulation of mechatronics systems can be performed using only one simulation environment. 

2.  MODEL STRUCTURE 

Intuitively speaking, a model that describes the dynamic behavior of a given system can not  be  used to  investigate  the  static behavior of  the very  same  system. Therefore,  in  order to capture  all  aspects, we  need a  variety  of  models, each one of them encapsulates some aspects of the real system. 

We  will  consider the mechatronics system model  as  a  set  of  connected submodels, each  submodel corresponds to  some realizable aspects.  In this  regard, the  term connected  was  used to emphasize  the dependency between the variables in these submodels. Throughout  the  process  of  modelling,  we shall  distinguish  between  the  following concepts, see Figure 1.