Towards Automated Exploration and Assembly of Vehicle Design Models

We describe the use of the Cyber-Physical Modeling Language (CyPhyML) to support trade studies and integration activities in system-level vehicle designs. CyPhyML captures integration interfaces across multiple design domains for system components, and generic design assembly rules given in terms of architecture alternatives. The CyPhyML tools support automated exploration of system-level architectural and parametric tradeoffs using a suite of design exploration tools that can be applied to models at different levels of fidelity and scale. Our overall approach includes exploration over the space of potential designs by evaluating structural combinations and then comparison of designs by simulating the dynamics of systems and subsystems with varying degrees of detail. In that flow, we use the DESERT toolkit for design tradeoffs that can be evaluated from the structure of the design model (i.e. interconnections of components and their parameters). DESERT extends a graphical modeling language with concepts and relations to define structural alternatives and constraints on system properties. Alternatives are given in an abstract way, decoupled from the details of the encoding of the combinatorial design space problem for the underlying binary decision diagram (BDD) solver. For desirable design instance models, the tools automatically assemble complete vehicle or subsystem computer-aided design (CAD) models from the associated component CAD models, and likewise create detailed finite-element structural analysis (FEA) models for selected component assemblies. Evaluation results are presented in a dashboard display which provides comparisons between different valid designs over all specified design metrics.Copyright © 2012 by ASME