White Paper One Model

One Model, Many Interests, Many Views

Introduction

In 1995, Jim Long presented a seminal paper at the International Symposium of the International

Council on Systems Engineering in which he set out the relational context for a range of behavioral

views used to depict the logical architecture of systems under study or design. That document has

guided our thinking and context for the ensuing years, giving us a way of thinking about the structure

of our presentation of design information.

Over the years, we have come to the realization that the work Long started in that paper was an

invitation for us to extend its application to other views. His first steps have inspired us to continue the

journey and to spread the value of his approach to an even wider audience. In that spirit we offer this

paper in the hope that it brings discipline and rigor to the systems engineering conversation and proves

as helpful to the reader as his paper has for audiences across the years.

Communication

The

INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook

lays out five essential benefits of model-based systems

engineering:

•

Improved communications

among the development stakeholders (e.g. the customer,

program management, systems engineers, hardware and software developers, testers, and

specialty engineering disciplines).

•

Increased ability to manage system complexity

by enabling a system model to be viewed

from multiple perspectives and to analyze the impact of changes.

•

Improved product quality

by providing an unambiguous and precise model of the

system that can be evaluated for correctness and completeness.

•

Enhanced knowledge capture

and reuse of the information by capturing information

in more standardized ways and leveraging built-in abstraction mechanisms inherent in model-

driven approaches. This in turn can result in reduced cycle time and lower maintenance costs

to modify the design.

•

Improved ability to teach and learn SE fundamentals

by providing a clear and

unambiguous representation of the concepts (

INCOSE 2015 Systems Engineering Handbook

p. 189).