Challenges for the Digital Transformation of Development Processes in Engineering

The development of production systems involves engineers from different disciplines and different departments, who work simultaneously on different aspects or components of the product. Engineers use multiple models and development tools that generate input and output information. Some of these outputs are inputs for other design steps, especially for other departments, or are essential inputs for decision making. For large mechatronic systems, these different processes, tool chains and the input and output data form a complex dependency. Often these dependencies are also not explicitly known, which leads to inefficient and error-prone design processes. In this paper some problems of traditional development processes from the production systems domain and address various challenges Engineers have to cope with are highlighted. These include interdisciplinary, an ever increasing complexity, and time pressure. Based on this, an approach to modernise inefficient processes and relieve the engineer of additional, unnecessary work in examining and exchanging data is presented.