16. October 2018

Industrial Companies can get Involved in the Center That Aims at Researching Integrated Model-Based Product Development

The Laboratory for Machine Tools  and Production Engineering WZL at RWTH Aachen University, the Institute for Machine Elements and Systems Engineering (MSE) and the Chair for Software Engineering (SE) are establishing the Center for Systems Engineering on the RWTH Aachen Campus together with companies – for example from the automotive, wind and software industries – and their suppliers. The Center is under the scientific direction of Prof. Günther Schuh (WZL), Prof. Georg Jacobs (MSE) and Prof. Bernhard Rumpe (SE). The industrial consortium and an interdisciplinary team of scientists are researching the topic of model-based system development. The Center for Systems Engineering in the Cluster Heavy Duty Drives combines processes, tools and models in the field of Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). The Center’s objective is to develop the key technologies required for tomorrow’s product development process while testing them holistically. Methods are to be developed that enable agile and automated product development by connecting the individual development steps to the development tools used, in order to meet the challenges of an increasing interdisciplinarity in the development of cyber-physical products. Interested companies can get involved in consortial and bilateral research projects in the Center and play an active role in shaping the Center’s orientation.

A key to the future innovative strength and competitiveness of companies lies in mastering agile product engineering processes (PEP) for complex, increasingly digitally networked technical products. Digitalization and new manufacturing processes call for new tools that enable PEP to be accelerated.

“We will digitally map a product’s functionality and usage reserves at every stage in its development and usage. This way, decision-making within agile development processes will be supported while individually coordinated operating strategies of digitized products will be facilitated”, Prof. Jacobs explains the Center’s motivation. This requires a paradigm shift in today’s PEP, which replaces the predominant system development based on document- and geometry-oriented processes with more powerful integrated processes. The MBSE offers suitable prerequisites for this. The introduction of function parameter-based system modeling creates a consistent development methodology that offers complete transparency on the process status and possible conflicts of objectives in the development process at any time during the development process.

Prof. Bernhard Rumpe, Chair of Software Engineering, on the challenges facing the Center for Systems Engineering: “The complexity of software in today’s systems is increasing significantly faster, which is why the development processes have to be rebalanced. The time has now come to combine the agile and model-based development processes of information technology with the design processes of mechanical engineering and thus achieve completely new approaches for the efficient development of innovative products, services and business models”.

The Center for Systems Engineering is a focal point of the Innovation Factory of the RWTH Aachen Campus, whose interdisciplinary ecosystem enables innovations from idea generation to industrialization. Progressive approaches promote creativity – know-how and infrastructure are available on-site. Further information can be found on the Center website.

Center for Systems Engineering | Cluster Heavy Duty Drives

The Center for Systems Engineering in the Cluster Heavy Duty Drives on the RWTH Aachen Campus pursues the goal of developing and holistically testing the key technologies required for tomorrow’s product development process. Methods are to be developed which enable agile and automated product development by connecting to the individual development steps and the development tools used. In the future, model-based system development will be disseminated and investigated in a wide variety of industries through this work. The Center is under the scientific direction of Prof. Günther Schuh, Prof. Georg Jacobs and Prof. Bernhard Rumpe. The Center was initiated by the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (Werkzeugmaschinenlabor, WZL), the Institute for Machine Elements and Systems Engineering (MSE) and the Chair of Software Engineering (SE).