Early Design Modeling and Simulation of Behaviors: Case Study of Mobile Work Machine

The early evaluation of a proposed function structure for a product and also, the possibility to expose the potential failures related to this provides that the design process can be modeled in its entirety. However, so far there are no existed suitable models for the early phase of design process. This article presents an integrated approach aimed to explore the behaviors of concept designs in the early design phase. The approach is founded on a combination of Petri net, π-numbers, qualitative physics principles and Design Structure Matrix. The final aim is to implement this method on the SysML modeling language to integrate a simulation approach that is initially not standardized in the language. A second interest of the approach is to provide a coherent simulation framework that can be used as a reference to verify the coherency of other simulation models further in the design process.