Abstract:

Multi-disciplinary virtual prototypes of complex products are increasingly and widely used in modern advanced manufacturing. How to effectively address the problems of unified modeling, composition and reuse based on the multi-disciplinary heterogeneous models has brought great challenges to the modeling and simulation (M&S) science and technology. This paper presents a top-level modeling theory based on the meta modeling framework (M2F) of the COllaborative SIMulation (COSIM) theory of virtual prototyping to solve the problems. Firstly the fundamental principles of the top-level modeling theory are decribed to expound the premise, assumptions, basic conventions and special requirements in the description of complex heterogeneous systems. Next the formalized definitions for each factor in top level modeling are proposed and the hierarchical nature of them is illustrated. After demonstrating that they are self-closing, this paper divides the toplevel modeling into two views, static structural graph and dynamic behavioral graph. Finally, a case study is discussed to demonstrate the feasibility of the theory.