Behavioral inheritance in object - oriented models for mechatronic system

The paper describes a formal framework for object-oriented modeling of mechatronic systems, whose main contribution is on one hand to unify the modeling approaches for dynamical systems and for industrial control software and, on the other hand, to provide a definition of inheritance, a cardinal concept in object-orientation, that emphasize the behavioral conformity of base and derived classes of objects. The proposed framework exploits the coalgebraic description of software artifacts to provide a connection between the behavioral approach for modeling dynamical systems and the object-oriented approach for software modeling and design. In particular, our definition of inheritance aims to allow control engineers to apply the design by extension methodology, widely used in software engineering, to the development of mechatronic components for manufacturing systems.