On enabling a model-based systems engineering discipline (original) (raw)

The United Federation of Models: Model-Based Systems Engineering at its Best

As systems become more complicated, managing them from conceptual design through disposal has become significantly more difficult. Traditional process- and document-based methods often struggle to cope with the realities of designing and fielding modern engineered systems; relevant information can become segmented and out-of-sync, leading to costly errors. The International Council on Systems Engineering initiated a Model-Based Systems Engineering initiative nearly fifteen years ago; one of the fruits of this effort is the System Modeling Language (SysML). Modern SysML tools are quite mature and have considerable capabilities to capture, characterize, and connect information. A number of efforts are currently underway to maximize the value of SysML models, including the development of visualization, co-simulation, and robust model integration. An entire ecosystem of adjacent tools is evolving that will significantly impact the practice of systems engineering within the next five years. The author will present an integrated look at publically-available information about existing worldwide efforts and their implications for systems engineering practitioners.

Model-based systems engineering: Motivation, current status, and research opportunities

Systems Engineering, 2018

As systems continue to grow in scale and complexity, the Systems Engineering community has turned to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to manage complexity, maintain consistency, and assure traceability during system development. It is different from "engineering with models," which has been a common practice in the engineering profession for decades. MBSE is a holistic, systems engineering approach centered on the evolving system model, which serves as the "sole source of truth" about the system. It comprises system specification, design, validation, and configuration management. Even though MBSE is beginning to see a fair amount of use in multiple industries, specific advances are needed on multiple fronts to realize its full benefits. This paper discusses the motivation for MBSE, and its current state of maturity. It presents systems modeling methodologies and the role of ontologies and metamodels in MBSE. It presents model-based verification and validation (V&V) as an example of MBSE use. An illustrative example of the use of MBSE for design synthesis is presented to demonstrate an important MBSE capability. The paper concludes with a discussion of challenges to widescale adoption and offers promising research directions to fully realize the potential benefits of MBSE.

Model-driven systems development

Ibm Systems Journal, 2006

Traditional systems development methods are designed to create a ''point solution''that is, a solution for a specific and static set of requirements. These methods result in systems that are sluggish in their response to dynamic conditions and changing requirements, expensive to maintain over extended periods of time, and prone to system failure. As an alternative to this approach, this paper describes a model-driven approach to systems development, which extends traditional systems engineering methods and is well-suited to a systems development environment characterized by rapidly changing conditions and requirements. We describe how model-driven systems development is performed by using the RUPt SE (Rational Unified Processt for Systems Engineering) architecture framework and transformation methods, which have been refined over eight years of field experience by Rationalt, IBM, and our clients.

Model-driven systems development: an introduction

European Journal of Information Systems, 2007

Traditional systems development methods are designed to create a ''point solution''that is, a solution for a specific and static set of requirements. These methods result in systems that are sluggish in their response to dynamic conditions and changing requirements, expensive to maintain over extended periods of time, and prone to system failure. As an alternative to this approach, this paper describes a model-driven approach to systems development, which extends traditional systems engineering methods and is well-suited to a systems development environment characterized by rapidly changing conditions and requirements. We describe how model-driven systems development is performed by using the RUPt SE (Rational Unified Processt for Systems Engineering) architecture framework and transformation methods, which have been refined over eight years of field experience by Rationalt, IBM, and our clients.

Model-Based System Engineering in Practice

Proceedings of the 14th Central and Eastern European Software Engineering Conference Russia on ZZZ - CEE-SECR '18, 2018

MegaM@Rt2 project is a collaborative initiative of the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under Horizon 2020 EU programme. The project regroups 26 partners from 6 different European countries who jointly address challenges of engineering modern cyberphysical systems by using model-based engineering methods. Since it is a model-based project, we adopted a similar approach for dealing with requirements analysis, architecture, design, roadmap planning and development status checking. In these tasks, document generation methods were particularly useful to create a set of "live" reference specifications and contractual reports. We believe that these methods perfectly demonstrate relevant benefits of the model-based approach and are applicable to many other contexts. Document generation has several challenges, since the produced documents should address several goals and target different audience. Hence, we describe this approach in detail in this paper in the form of an experience report.

Towards Automating Model-Based Systems Engineering in Industry - An Experience Report

The 18th Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SYSCON 2024), 2024

Designing modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) is posing new challenges to both industrial practitioners and academics. In this context, adopting cutting-edge paradigms, such as Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), DevOps, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), can offer new opportunities for improving CPS design automation. While such paradigms are already jointly used in the research community to support system design activities, there is a need to fill the gap between academia and industrial practitioners. Indeed, system specification is still mainly performed manually in many industrial projects. In this paper, we present a collaboration between industrial and academic partners of the AIDOaRt European project towards a model-based approach for CPS engineering applied in one of the project use cases. We identify key challenges and corresponding solutions to enhance the automation of CPS design processes. Notably, we consider a combination of prescriptive modeling, model transformations, model views, modeling process mining, and AIbased modeling recommendations. As an initial evaluation, the proposed approach is applied to a practical industrial case study.

Integrated framework for Model-Driven Systems Engineering: A research roadmap

2016

In recent decades, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) practices have continuously aided the adoption of system analysis approaches like simulation, formal analysis and enactment by non-expert users. However, due to limited portability of models between different approaches, exhaustive analysis of complex systems still depend largely on creating disparate models designated for different analysis goals to get complementary solutions to the problem. Productivity and efficiency of the process can be greatly improved by integrating the different approaches in a framework which offers a unified modeling interface and automated synthesis of all required artifacts. This paper suggests a framework as a roadmap for further research towards realizing this goal. First we present the architecture of the framework, then we present the steps to build the syntax of the unified formalism at its kernel and an illustrative case study as a proof of concept for the proposal.

7.2.2 Advancing Model-Based Systems Engineering at a Small Space Agency

INCOSE International Symposium, 2008

This paper reviews recent and current efforts to implement Model-Based Systems Engineering at the Canadian Space Agency. A mission under concept development is being used both for demonstration purposes and also for real process design with SysML. Several support and bridge tools have been developed to help with key process issues. A number of technology issues have come out of our work, leading to a wish list of improvements we would like to see. Also, we have been dealing with organizational resistance that is preventing a wider acceptance of MBSE.

Collaboration in Model-Based Systems Engineering based on Application Scenarios

2014

The engineering of mechatronic systems is a challenge due to the various domains involved. MBSE is regarded as the future paradigm of product engineering to face this challenge – not restricted to any domain or industry. The core concept is a system model which allows a holistic perspective of the system in a domain-spanning way. MBSE gained momentum within the last years. Nevertheless, numerous barriers exist that inhibit the implementation of MBSE; especially there is little attention on the socio-technical aspects of product engineering as stakeholders, their roles and responsibilities and how to organize modeling processes in projects. Application scenarios are suggested as an approach to define and analyze situations in product engineering, when the system model provides benefit. It describes e.g. ways to create or to use the system model and to collaborate and interact on them. This will help to gain more acceptance of the MBSE approach.