Model-Based Early Validation and Verification of Design Decisions for Cross-Disciplinary Stakeholders

Sammanfattning

Systems engineering becomes more challenging as system engineers must tackle increasingly growing and complex systems while balancing stakeholder needs, dependability, costs, and much more. Engineering decisions at early stages become important as their impact can affect the product's entire life cycle. Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE) is a way to capture this system complexity and explore how different engineering decisions affect a system. With this in mind, this thesis will explore how MBSE can capture engineering decisions and their impact at early stages of development and what insight can be gained into a system. This is done by exploratively creating a concept, using it on a toy example to get direct feedback on its performance, and refining the concept before evaluating it in a case study. The case study evaluates the concept in an industrial context through a focus group and receives direct industry feedback. The modelling concept is implemented in Papyrus Eclipse as a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile to capture concept-specific details and an Eclipse plugin. This implementation is to retrieve and process data from the modelled system. This is used to answer impact questions of choices, such as: "How much does this parameter change if component X is exchanged for another?".The evaluation of the concept was generally positive and gave valuable feedback and possible future directions of the concept. This includes the opinion that a spread sheet gives a better overview of the system and ways to expand the tool though parameterised relations and other suggestions. The thesis in the end presents, one way that MBSE can be used to support the analysis of early cross-disciplinary models, and two major insights which could be gained, namely risk and constraints.