Functional Modelling in Engineering: A First Comparison of Approaches on Two Problems

Functional modelling is a well-studied topic in engineering and applies more broadly to areas like biology, management and organization studies. While it is an essential part of building and describing engineering systems, to apply functional modelling consistently in practice remains difficult. This obstacle is especially painful since digitalisation is becoming an increasingly important aspect of modern engineering enterprises. To study the causes of such a difficulty, we analyze two typical problems that are encountered when modelling engineering systems and that are intertwined with functional aspects: identity of system components across time, and granularity management of the system models. The problems are introduced and used to compare a few ontological and engineering approaches that can deal with them. We illustrate our findings with a brief example.