Needs for Tracing the Consequences of Decisions in Mechatronics Design

As the design of mechatronic systems relies on different technical and scientific disciplines, it is often difficult to anticipate, at the earliest, the consequences of design choices on the final product. The role of the evaluation process is to support designers each time engineering choices must be made or justified. Being able to estimate the impact of design decisions on key technical performance indicators is one objective of our research. After having presented the activities of the evaluation process, we propose a meta-model of the data required by evaluation in the context of the Systems Engineering framework. Then we investigate how the top down and bottom up tracing of technical requirements through Block Systems and between systems engineering layers of the ‘onion model’ may help designers analyze the consequences of design decisions on the final product. The research is illustrated through the development of a wheelchair with electrical assistance so as to allow reduced mobility people to move and work outside with less tiredness.