Model-driven systems engineering: state-of-the-art and research challenges

Model-driven software engineering is a well investigated and heavily used technique for software development. Within automation engineering we want to benefit from these ideas and concepts by adopting them to systems engineering. Parallel processes in systems engineering demand high synchronization effort between different disciplines, their engineers, and processes. Unfortunately, these processes are concurrently established, but do only support sequential engineering. With model-driven systems engineering we want to enable systems engineers to model their domain knowledge and tooling on a more abstract level. Thus, engineers may benefit in increasing efficiency and quality for the resulting products from existing integration approaches of engineering artifacts and tools. By means of an integration approach we are able to synchronize and check consistency of model data that evolved parallel in different tools. In this contribution, we present a new classification scheme for integration scenarios and explain our modeling and integration approach together with a proof-of-concept use case and prototype, located in automation engineering.