简介

Professor Tetsuo Tomiyama has been Professor of Life Cycle Engineering at Manufacturing and Materials Department, School of Applied Sciences, Cranfield University in UK since October 2012. Prior to this appointment, he was Professor at Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Material Engineering of Delft University of Technology between July 2002 and September 2012, Professor at Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering (RACE) of the University of Tokyo between April 1998 and June 2002, and Associate Professor at the Department of Precision Machinery Engineering of the University of Tokyo between July 1987 and March 1998. Since July 2007, he is Visiting Professor in Design and Sustainability Engineering at the Institute of Industrial Science of the University of Tokyo as well. He was honored his doctorate degree (Doctor of Engineering) in precision machinery engineering from the Graduate School of the University of Tokyo in March 1985.

Professor Tomiyama’s research activities cover a variety of research topics in engineering design and life cycle engineering. He is an internationally well-known expert in design theory and methodology, function modeling, systems architecting, maintenance engineering, and service engineering. More recently, he is active in autonomous maintenance in collaboration with EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-Life Engineering Services hosted at Cranfield and Durham Universities.

Professor Tomiyama has been awarded a number of prestigious awards including Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2012. He is a fellow of CIRP (The International Academy for Production Engineering), JSME (The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers), and SDPS (Society for Design and Process Science).

Lecture Abstract:

Mechatronics systems (or CPS: Cyber Physical Systems, in a broader sense) have become more and more complex. This raises numerous issues and concerns in their development process encompassing such topics as quality, cost, time to deliver, project management, team organisation, life cycles, and supply chains. The concept of systems architecture plays an increasingly crucial role in managing complexity resulting from these issues by giving an overview of different views in which the system is defined and modelled, by integrating information of the target system across these views, and by facilitating mutual communication among various stakeholder involved in the systems development. The process to generate and define systems architecture is called systems architecting. The most accepted model of systems development is the V-model which consists of requirement analysis, systems architecting, implementation, integration, verification, and validation as its fundamental processes. The systems architecting process consists of hierarchical systems decomposition (i.e., hierarchically defining subsystems and their relationships among each other) and interface definitions.

While conceptually systems architecting is straightforward and intuitively easy to comprehend, its “algorithm” is less known. Our previous work focused on algorithmic functional systems decomposition based on physical phenomena. As opposed to this, there is so-called flow-based function modelling and the other is Suh’s axiomatic design, both of which have different ways for decomposition. These three methods treat a “functional carrier” that performs required functions differently. Because of this, they all treat how functions are “allocated” to a functional carrier differently. Functional carriers need to be clearly distinguished when information plays a crucial role. In mechatronics, exchanging information and synchronising action timing are critically important.

At Cranfield University, our group was trying to develop collaborative robotic maintenance systems. Collaborative robotics includes both physical collaboration and information level collaboration. While physical collaboration itself is a big research topic, information level collaboration (or communication) such as timing synchronisation is a necessary condition to be solved before physical collaboration. In order to reduce the complexity of information level collaboration, our group successfully applied the concept of functional allocation to the timing synchronisation problem.