Commonality Analysis of Families of Physical Models for use in Scientific Computing

This paper presents a template for the commonality analysis of a family of models of physical phenomena. The commonality analysis template includes documentation of the potential system context, the variabilities between models and the common aspects shared by all family members, including sections for terminology, goals, assumptions and theoretical models. The commonality analysis document also explicitly shows the dependence between terminology, goals, assumptions, theoretical models and variabilities. The proposed template is demonstrated by presenting the example of a family of constitutive equations that model the deformation of a material particle under an applied load.