A Domain-Specific Language for Dependency Management in Model-Based Systems Engineering

The varying stakeholder concerns in product development today introduces a number of design challenges. From the perspective of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), a particular challenge is that multiple views established to address the stakeholder concerns are overlapping with many dependencies in between. The important question is how to adequately manage such dependencies. The primary hypothesis of this paper is that modeling dependencies explicitly adds value to the design process and in addition supports consistency management. We propose a domain-specific language called as the Dependency Modeling Language (DML) to capture the dependencies between multiple views at the appropriate level of abstraction, and utilize this knowledge to support a dependency management process. The approach is illustrated through a dependency model between three views of a robot design example. In addition, we discuss how to analyze dependency graphs for consistency checking, change management, traceability and workflow management.