Most mechatronic systems have becoming software-intensive. Even in their early design, the software and physical domains intersect with each other deeply. It is significant to capture and process the cross-domain influences automatically to avoid design defects in late stages. Semantic web technologies have been recognized as effective enabling technologies to support cross-domain knowledge representation and inference. However, how to correlate the knowledge of software and physical designs, which have divergent characteristics in an ontological knowledge is the difficulty. In this study, with the help of semantic web technologies, an automated software-physical co-design approach is proposed based on a hybrid function ontology, which unifies the physical-centric flow-based functional representation and software-centric data/control flow diagram. Software and physical designs are linked to this unified functional ontology such that the execution sequences controlled by software can constrain the physical design and the updates on the execution sequences introduced by physical design can be reflected on software behaviors. An ontology-based framework is implemented to support this approach. Two case studies from different application areas are illustrated to show its effectiveness.

大多数机电一体化系统已经变得软件密集。即使在其早期设计中，软件和物理领域仍会深深相交。自动捕获和处理跨域影响对于避免后期设计缺陷很重要。语义Web技术已被视为支持跨域知识表示和推理的有效使能技术。然而，如何使在本体知识中具有不同特征的软件和物理设计知识相关联是困难的。在这项研究中，借助语义网络技术，提出了一种基于混合功能本体的自动软件-物理协同设计方法，该方法将基于物理中心流的功能表示与以软件中心数据/控制流程图相统一。软件和物理设计链接到该统一的功能本体，这样，由软件控制的执行序列可以约束物理设计，而物理设计引入的对执行序列的更新可以反映在软件行为上。实现了基于本体的框架来支持该方法。说明了来自不同应用领域的两个案例研究，以显示其有效性。