System Analysis and Modeling Group

The next generation of advanced mechatronic systems is expected to behave more intelligently than today’s systems. These systems are expected to enhance their functionality and improve their per-formance by building communities of autonomous agents which exploit local and global networking. Such mechatronic systems will therefore include complex coordination protocols which re-quire execution in real-time and reconfiguration of the locally em-ployed control algorithms at runtime to adjust their behavior to the changing system goals leading to self-adaptation. In this paper we will present an extension of the MECHATRONIC UML approach which will enable us to model collaborations between components which include structural adaptation and multi-ports. Besides the modeling of complex collaborations and the rules to join and leave these collaborations via ports and multi-ports, we propose to em-ploy hierarchical state machines with a dynamic number of subma-chines to model the behavior of the multi-ports. For the collabora-tions this involves the related protocols, while for the components we have to refine this behavior to ensure a proper synchronization with other parts of the component behavior