Model-Driven Systems Engineering for Virtual Product Design

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) aims to provide a systems engineering methodology that leverages modeling methods to support design, analysis, verification, and validation of systems. As such, methodologies for MBSE have to be able to integrate heterogeneous engineering models from a variety of domains, including mechanical engineering, product design, legislation, and many more. Most research in this area usually only focuses on general system descriptions of a step in the system development process, without providing any interdisciplinary or interprocess connections. Thus, the models created by the domain experts are often unconnected and not suited for automated model transformations. We present a method to integrate abstract system descriptions in the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models, which are not only the primary model for geometrical hardware descriptions but also the starting point of most process chains in the context of virtual product development. The transformations of our method are realized in a plug-in for the MagicDraw modeling environment and support to generate parameters of a parameter and constraint CAD modeling approach from a SysML model. This automates the integration of abstract system descriptions with design models to foster a coherent virtual product development.