A survey on what users think about SysML

Abstract

Systems Modeling Language (SysML) has been applied in the past years to a variety of software and systems engineering projects, by hundreds of researchers, engineers, and other systems and software professionals. Thus, it is expected that all this experience has been described in research articles. Therefore, we propose a survey describing what practitioners and researchers think about this modeling language, the actual use of SysML, and how SysML is used in the software and system engineering life cycle. This article describes a survey on SysML, answering questions such as the most used diagrams for each phase of the development of a system, the most common domains, and other data about the participants. The survey was answered by 343 participants from 38 countries, mostly systems engineers, software and systems architects, and researchers. Industry and academia can use our results (i) for assisting researchers and engineers to select appropriate diagrams for each software and systems development phase, (ii) for a better understanding of which industry domains SysML is most commonly applied, (iii) as a reference for identifying which types of systems are modeled with SysML, (iv) for knowing which software tools are most used, and (v) which other modeling languages are most commonly integrated with SysML for software and systems development.

Bridging the Gap between SysML and OPC UA Information Models for Industry 4.0.

“…On the other hand, it has been intentionally designed to be less software-centric than UML and instead places greater emphasis on systems modeling. In detail, while UML involves modeling classes and addressing software engineering, SysML involves modeling blocks and provides the vocabulary for system engineering (Santos & Soares 2023). Technically, SysML reuses a subset of UML 2 and provides additional extensions addressing requirements for systems engineering.…”