Supporting construction of simulation model appropriate for design requirements

Abstract

The use of multi-domain physical simulation, such as Modelica, in the early stage of product design is recently attracting much attention. However, to attain an insightful simulation model, much time and effort, potentially even requiring experiments, is required. Therefore, it is important to attain an appropriate simulation model that depicts significant physical phenomena while excluding unnecessary details. This paper proposes a method to attain an appropriate simulation model. Initially, an appropriate composition for the simulation model is deliberated based on a preliminary model, called the Actor Component Dynamics model. The Actor Component Dynamics model describes how components of a product physically interact with external entities. Though it depicts the physics underling the product, actual equations are excluded so that engineers can describe the model without exerting excessive effort. By analyzing dependencies between evaluation metrics and the design parameters of a product on the Actor Component Dynamics model, an appropriate composition for the simulation model is explored and developed. Through an example application, the design of a hair dryer, validity of the proposed method is confirmed. In that different requirements, design policies and user preferences result in different compositions for the simulation model.