Recently, mechatronics as a self-contained discipline
has doubtlessly shaped the development of technical systems.
Mechatronics means the close interaction of mechanics, electronics,
control engineering and software engineering in order to
achieve a better systems behavior. Due to the advancement of
information and communication technologies, the functionality of
mechatronic systems will go far beyond current standards along
with the potential to increase their robustness, flexibility and
reliability. The design of such advanced mechatronic systems is a
challenge. The increasing complexity requires a consistent comprehension
of the tasks between all the developers involved. Especially
during the early design phases (conceptual design/ system
design), the communication and cooperation between the
mechanical, electrical, control and software engineers is necessary
to design a first overall system model. In this context, the
main difficulty is how to integrate into a system model the solutions
that have already been successfully used and described in
detail. Currently, the reuse is partially established during discipline-specific
engineering – in areas such as mechanics and software
engineering. Nevertheless, a catalogue of domain-spanning
reusable abstracts that may describe solution patterns for holistic
system designs does not exist. Hence, to create a collective solution
space as wide as possible, it is necessary to abstract gradually
the discipline-specific described solutions on a generic level. The
precondition is a functional description. It is easy to see that a
function has to depict the solution in a neutral and abstract way
as well as the volitional relation between the input and the output
of a system. In our work, we present the necessary abstraction of
domain specific solutions exemplified by reusable and detailed
described solutions of software engineering.