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144 Model Driven Systems Development with Rational Products
Introduction
SysML was developed in response to the same issues that MDSD
addresses—the need to be able to promote shared understanding across a wide
set of stakeholders and participants in the systems development process, the
need to manage complexity through separation of concerns with multiple views
of a system, and the need to provide traceability through a hierarchy of models,
among other things.
2
MDSD (RUP SE) as contributor to SysML
MDSD, like RUP SE and object-oriented software engineering (OOSE), predates
SysML. In fact, MDSD was developed in response to the same kinds of
pressures that Rational and then IBM clients were feeling as they developed
large, complex, systems of systems. SysML was developed by a consortium of
industry participants. IBM and their SysML partner EmbeddedPlus Engineering
played an active role in its development (especially IBM participants Murray
Cantor and Laurent Balmelli, and EmbeddedPlus participants Salah Obeid, Cory
Bialowas, Jim Hummell, and Kumar Marimuthu) contributing concepts and
writing parts of the specification. Concepts from RUP SE influenced the
development of SysML, for instance, the need for means to express semantics of
localities, distribution of responsibilities, and ability to reason about
non-functional requirements and a wide variety of stakeholder concerns.
MDSD with SysML
Because SysML was developed in response to the same kinds of issues that
MDSD wants to address, it makes sense to use SysML to do MDSD. In essence,
SysML is optimized to address the very concerns of MDSD, as noted before. In
particular, the use of SysML makes reasoning about parametrics much more
effective than trying to do the same in UML. Likewise, traceability between
requirements and design elements can be done in SysML, whereas there are no
explicit semantics in UML for handling the relationship between requirements
and design elements. Finally, the concept of a block transcends the software
domain and is intended to express multiple kinds of system elements—while
classes can be used to express many of the semantics expressed by blocks, they
have a software flavor to them which seems to be antithetical to systems
engineers. Furthermore, classes cannot express the kinds of semantics that
blocks can, especially in the area of parametrics.
2
S. Friedenthal, A. Moore, and R. Steiner, OMG SysML Tutorial, pg. 8,
http://www.omgsysml.org/INCOSE-2007-OMG-SysML-Tutorial.pdf