Authors:
Philippe Barbie
;
Martin Becker
and
Andreas Schäfer
Affiliation:
Fraunhofer IESE, Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Keyword(s):
Model Transformation, Interaction-Based Transformation, Rule-Based-Modelling, Interaction-Patterns, Complexity, MBSE, SysML, UML.
Abstract:
While UML and SysML are important concepts for digitally representing complex systems, we are still confronted with the problems of comprehensibility and maintainability. Even models with comparatively few elements can quickly become confusing and hard to read, due to their relationship density. This leads to potential errors, both for the initial modelling and the later model evolution and evaluation phase. Driven by the needs of a large-scale modelling project in the field of communication systems, we have researched approaches to cope with the inherent model complexity by following a modelling approach, that is based on interaction patterns. In this paper, we will give an introduction to the challenge of the consistently increasing complexity of system models in the field of model-based systems engineering (MBSE). We will motivate our need for rule-based modelling in order to handle a real industry use case and outline the problems of system modeling, which could be solved by usin
g a new rule-based modelling approach. InTra (Interaction-based Transformation) is an approach to significantly reduce the complexity of a system model, by reducing the number of connectors through the use of interaction rules. By doing so, we were able to create an abstracted variant of the same system model, but with a highly reduced number of connectors used and thus an overall reduced model complexity.
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