New Framework Helps Teams Track Design Changes in Complex Engineering Projects

<p>At its very core, model-based systems engineering uses models to enable a multidisciplinary view on a system design in the early stages. These early stage models evolve horizontally: new diagrams for further perspectives and disciplines are added, using the same notation and the same abstraction level. Just as any other process in systems engineering, horizontal model evolution is subject to guidelines and standards, and the multidisciplinary view on a horizontal evolution, involving at least two disciplines, requires referring to multiple guidelines. Despite the significant effort invested in this process, there is no framework or tool support for engineering reviews of horizontal model evolution. In this paper, we aim to support engineering reviews by providing traceability for engineering activities that evolve a model horizontally. Our contribution is a process-agnostic framework that relies on capturing the intent of model changes in addition to the changes themselves. We group the model changes into transactional units called deltas, which are subsequently annotated with the engineer's intent to perform these specific changes. We give a methodology to integrate such intent-annotated deltas into engineering reviews and audits, an ontology to capture intent, and a meta-model for the deltas to achieve a language- and guideline-independent framework. We use an example from the earth moving machinery domain to exemplify the need for horizontal model evolution and provide a prototypical proof-of-concept implementation in the SysML Papyrus Plugin for Eclipse and a SysML case study using a machine brake system.</p>