Thirteen years of SysML: a systematic mapping study

Abstract

The OMG standard Systems Modeling Language (SysML) has been on the market for about thirteen years. This standard is an extended subset of UML providing a graphical modeling language for designing complex systems by considering software as well as hardware parts. Over the period of thirteen years, many publications have covered various aspects of SysML in different research fields. The aim of this paper is to conduct a systematic mapping study about SysML to identify the different categories of papers, (i) to get an overview of existing research topics and groups, (ii) to identify whether there are any publication trends, and (iii) to uncover possible missing links. We followed the guidelines for conducting a systematic mapping study by Petersen et al. (Inf Softw Technol 64:1-18, 2015) to analyze SysML publications from 2005 to 2017. Our analysis revealed the following main findings: (i) there is a growing scientific interest in SysML in the last years particularly in the research field of Software Engineering, (ii) SysML is mostly used in the design or validation phase, rather than in the implementation phase, (iii) the most commonly used diagram types are the SysML-specific requirement diagram, parametric diagram, and block diagram, together with the activity diagram and state machine diagram known from UML, (iv) SysML is a specific UML profile mostly used in systems engineering; however, the language has to be customized to accommodate domain-specific aspects, (v) related to collaborations for SysML research over the world, there are more individual research groups than large international networks. This study provides a solid basis for classifying existing approaches for SysML. Researchers can use our results (i) for identifying open research issues, (ii) for a better understanding of the state of the art, and (iii) as a reference for finding specific approaches about SysML.

Comparative analysis of a model‐based systems engineering approach to a traditional systems engineering approach for architecting a robotic space system through knowledge categorization

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An ontological metamodel for cyber-physical system safety, security, and resilience coengineering

“…Different vendors have implemented the SysML standard, and therefore, there is an abundance of tools available in the market. As a standard, SysML allows for a variety of systems engineering approaches to be developed within what might be considered a metamodel specification for system design [79]. In 2017, the OMG issued a request for proposals for a second-generation specification known as SysMLv2 [34].…”

An Integrated Model-Based Tool Chain for Managing Variability in Complex System Design

“…But again, it is not clear how variability is captured in behavior models. As stated in an literature survey, [8], activity and state machine diagrams are widely used in systems engineering. Thus, it is important to be able to define variants in behavior models as well.…”

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