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This text book introduces systems engineering for designing systems in multidisciplinary projects. First an overview of the systems engineering process is given. Several systems thinking tracks are presented, to think about the system in a number of ways, its context, its user, its functionality, its past and its future. This to stimulate creativity of the system designer, and to force out-of-the-box thinking. Dynamic thinking, feedback thinking, specific-generic thinking project thinking, life-cylce thinking to name a few. A number of practical design tools are presented that support both the systems engineering process and the systems thinking tracks: 9-windows diagram, context diagram, system budgets, fun-key architecting, A3 architecture overview, risk management, modeling and simulation, documenting and reviewing. The message is exemplified using a case study throughout the text.

The aim of this project is to get insight how Real-time Ethernet behaves with respect to the field bus called Locbus. By writing a benchmarks for both systems the characterisations of both buses is performed. The transmission is time, the time which necessary to get the data to and of the card. Variability of measured data or so-called jitter is also determined. From the research it becomes clear that Ethernet is faster than Locbus. Locbus however is assumed more stable because the protocol is generated in the hardware. The test for this statement could not be performed because interrupts are not supported by the Locbus hardware. For large quantities of data Real-time Ethernet is recommended using, because then the speed will play a larger role. To get a better insight if it is realisable for a field bus to be replaced by Real-time Ethernet it is advised to build a test set-up which uses Real-time Ethernet.

The development of control software for mechatronic systems is presented by means of a case study: a 2 DOF mechanical rotational set-up usable as a camera-positioning device. The control software is generated using the code generation facility of 20-SIM, thus guaranteeing the generated code being the same as verified by simulation during the controller design phase. We use CTC++ (Communicating Threads for C++) as Communication Abstraction Layer to facilitate the conversion process from the block diagram describing the controller towards the control computer code. Furthermore, CTC++ enables the use of distributed and different processors as target computer, since distributivity and heterogeneity are explicitly accounted for in the CTC++ library. CTC++ provides the tools to make the application realtime. Real-time Linux provides us the real-time operating system resources that are needed to create a real-time environment for the real-time application.