The Challenges of Building Advanced Mechatronic Systems

Mechatronics is an engineering discipline integrating the fields of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. While the word "mechatronics" already has a long history, it is only the last ten years that we see their application all around us. Cars, CD players, washing machines, railways are all examples of mechatronic systems. The main characteristic (and driving force) of recent advances is the progressively tighter coupling of mechanic and electronic components with software. This makes software engineering (together with network technology) the main computer science discipline involved in mechatronics. In this paper we survey current developments and discuss future trends in mechatronics, in particular from a software engineering point of view. The future of mechatronics will specifically see a move towards a high degree of adaptibility and self-organisation. This poses new challenges on software engineering, especially on modelling, code generation and analysis. We exemplify existing as well as future strands by a collaborative research and development project of a mechatronic rail system from the University of Paderborn.