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One Model, Many Interests, Many Views

Systems engineering has not yet arrived at a single metamodel that defines our concepts, their context, and the interrelationships in a formal way that underpins the necessary knowledge capture, analysis, and communication. The following is one representation of critical systems engineering concepts and their interrelationships spanning requirements, behavior, architecture, and test. Based upon 50 years of practical application and continued evolution, this integrated model presents a high-level view of not only the ultimate specification of a system, but also the journey to that specification – concerns opened and closed, risks identified and managed, and more.

In this single repository setting, views are dynamically generated directly from the system design repository, ensuring that they are consistent with current design details. A change made in any view changes the design information in the repository and, conversely, a change made to the database is automatically reflected in the views. In this way, the communication through the views of the model is “real time” in representing the current state of the design at the moment the view is generated. Furthermore, because any changes to a view are reflected directly into the model itself, all other views drawn from the model will communicate the model consistent with the latest changes. In short, everyone interested in the model can be certain that they are seeing it – regardless of the chosen view – consistently and concurrently with the rest of the model’s constituency.

With that background, we will turn our attention to the language of model communication.

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