Consistency, integration, and reuse in multi-disciplinary design processes: through an architecture modeling framework

Abstract

This work has been published using L A T E X 2 ε and the Twentethesis documentclass.Duurt even, maar dan heb je ook wat... SummaryThe development of modern (mechatronic) systems demands close cooperation between experts from multiple engineering disciplines. These disciplines each speak their own engineering language and can even have conflicting views of what the system is. This leads to a complex situation that impedes the communication between these experts, as well as the integration of design and analysis tools.The main 'pressures' in improving multi disciplinary design are the improvement of system performance, time-to-market and cost. This can be improved by facilitating communication between stakeholders, modeling architectural concerns and other important design information, and facilitating capturing and reusing design knowledge across disciplines. These pressures, however, cannot be subject to direct scientific research, as experiments cannot be easily realized: We cannot let multiple companies perform multiple design processes to compare methods that aim to improve the pressures. Instead, the pressures are 'transformed' in the issues of consistency, integration and reuse, which can be evaluated through case studies. As such, the hypothesis for this thesis is: The consistency, integration and reusability of multi-disciplinary design processes can be improved by facilitating communication between stakeholders, modeling architectural concerns and other important design information, and facilitating capturing and reusing design knowledge across disciplines.To help this communication, multiple stakeholders need to have a shared model to: share design decisions, create common understanding of the design process, share deliverables (workflow), and keep this shared information consistent. In such a model, stakeholders can make their own views to create models for their aspects of the system. The information in these views can be connected to other views, and even reused by copying or referencing. This facilitates the stakeholder gathering the information from multiple sources to do his job, or allow exposing his concerns so he can influence activities performed by experts of other disciplines.The argument of this thesis is: there is a lack of a common language that can describe both the system architecture and information flows in the design process. Such a language should enable us to model the shared information between the designers and their models and the tools that they use. There is no unifying modeling language to exchange information across disciplines, across design process phases and across levels of granularity. This means we lack the means to make a model of all design aspects, especially the ones that cut across the design disciplines. We lack the means to model how information from the mono disciplinary design tasks is handed over to subsequent design tasks. And we lack the means VIII to provide a big picture of how mono disciplinary design information is connected to the abstract system wide ...

Collective understanding of system behavior : incorporating simulations in conceptual systems design

“…In fact, there is an inherent opposition between understandability and formality [Bonnema, 2014]. This supports the conclusion that for example the formal approach used in Model Based Systems Engineering is less suited for communication, and is more suited to ensure re-use, consistency and integration [Woestenenk, 2014].…”

“…SIMILAR is an acronym for: State the problem, Investigate alternatives, Model the system, Integrate, Launch the system, Assess performance, and Re-evaluate. SIMILAR explicitly covers both spiral and staged development models [Woestenenk, 2014]. Furthermore, an explicit step in the process is to model the system (the M in SIMILAR), which is interesting as this is not explicitly described in most other design methodologies.…”

“…Another example of the application of MBSE is the Architecture Modeling (AM) language of [Woestenenk, 2014], which is an approach that tries to capture all relevant engineering information during complex systems development. Differences with SysML are that the AM models different views concurrently.…”

“…Using models as a primary means of information exchange instead of a document-centric approach can improve consistency, re-use and integration [Woestenenk, 2014]. One of the most well-known formal approaches to using models in systems engineering is Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).…”

“…MBSE applications such as the Architecture Model [Woestenenk, 2014], SysML [Object Management Group Inc., 2012] and OCDT [Koning et al, 2014] formalize all concepts in a system and link them in a database.…”