CHAPTER 9 – ARCHITECTURES

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the concept of architecture. It explains its use in the mechatronic design process. Architectures are concerned with the high-level structuring of designs, both in spatial and temporal terms. The use of architectures in design is to deal systematically with a number of requirements that arise. The various major features of architectures are responses to such requirements. Some of these requirements and the architectural responses to them are: the need for hierarchy to control complexity; the need for heterarchy to control flexibility; the need for distributed systems to control cost and operating speed; and the need for modularization to control intelligibility, manufacturability and maintainability. The chapter also describes the architecture proposals that are particularly relevant to mechatronics, especially when the emphasis is on intelligent machines. The layered architectures of these proposals are applicable equally to the computational, mechanical, electronic, or other subsystems of a mechatronic system.