Mapping the MBSE Environment and Complementary Design Space Exploration Techniques

Today’s MBSE tools and environments are highly varied and therefore present a challenge for organizations looking to implement MBSE. Furthermore, while MBSE environments are highly capable of supporting the description of design baselines, the current capabilities within these environments could be further refined for exploring alternative designs. As a result it is important to gain an understanding of the limitations of current MBSE tooling in performing the valuable activity of design space exploration, and identify a set of candidate techniques to combat these. This paper reviews the various options available to MBSE practitioners by comparing some of the most common MBSE languages, tools and methods. The possible issues that can be encountered when exploring different designs have been identified and assigned a severity rating. A set of design space exploration techniques are presented, and where possible these have been sourced from existing literature. A knowledge graph has been constructed to collect all this data into a structured format, containing all the MBSE languages, tools, methods, design space exploration-related issues and techniques, as well as the relationships between each of these. This knowledge graph, implemented as a Neo4j graph database, allowed deeper insights to be drawn from the collected information. By defining a selected MBSE environment, including language, tool and method, the knowledge graph could be used to identify the least troublesome sequence (with minimum number of related issues) to arrive at a desired design artifact, for example a set of optimized system parameters. Beside this, the knowledge graph could be used to display the relationships and clusters of MBSE languages, tools and methods, to assist organizations with selecting suitable MBSE environment elements. Future work will bring greater depth to the analysis available with the knowledge graph, for instance, differentiation between different types of design space exploration issues and techniques.