Flow Heuristics for Functional Modelling in Model-Based Systems Engineering

Abstract

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is increasingly used across industries for the integrated modelling of complex systems to support model-based development and provide enhanced traceability between requirements and verification and validation of the system. This paper seeks to strengthen the function modelling methodology in MBSE by introducing an approach based on flow heuristics guided by the System State Flow Diagram schema. This provides function representations with an enhanced integrity in MBSE facilitating the solution-agnostic architecture modelling, and supports integrated simulation and function failure reasoning based on MBSE. The approach is illustrated with a case study of an electric bicycle implemented in the MathWorks System Composer environment.

Extending the function failure modes taxonomy for intelligent systems with embedded AI components

“…This approach is useful from the point of view of multidisciplinary systems (including hardware and embedded software and AI), because the functionality can be abstracted to operations on flows, thus enabling an integrated treatment across the different nature of components. In terms of basic function representation, we refer to the modified statechart approach of Yildirim et al (2017Yildirim et al ( , 2023, in which the function is defined as a state transition or transformation, referring to the input and outputs states of objects, described in terms of measurable attributes (Figure 2). This facilitates the representation of functions with multiple attributes, including time.…”