ESD Special Lecture: Products and Services

SysML – The Systems Modeling Language for Systems Engineering and Product Development

By Dr. Laurent Balmelli
Manager, IBM Software Group

Abstract:
Today's competition and market pressure forces manufacturing companies to improve their effectiveness to plan, design and manufacture products that contain software and hardware (electrical, mechanical, etc.) This presentation gives an overview of an emerging standard supported by the Object Management Group (OMG), SysML (www.sysml.org) - the Systems Modeling Language, for the representation of product requirements, architectures, behavior and functions.

SysML is based on the actual standard for software modeling, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) developed within the Object Management Group (OMG www.omg.org.) SysML has been developed by the SysML Partners as an answer to the Request For Proposal (RFP) issued by the OMG in March 2003. The SysML partners include representatives from companies such as IBM, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, John Deere, NASA, Motorola, DoD (Department of Defense), Northrop Grumman, Telelogic, I-Logix, Gentleware, and others.

SysML responds to multiple needs along the product development lifecycle, for example: It enables efficient development of product requirements, design traceability across the lifecycle, impact analysis of capabilities, and trade studies at early stages of the design. Representing products using SysML allows storing engineering knowledge and turns engineering expertise into a reusable and durable company asset. The improved development processes emerging from these new modeling capabilities translate into faster time-to-market, increased design reuse and product commonality, cost reduction and enhanced product features. In this talk, I will focus on the content and semantics of the language and outline the differences between SysML and UML2.0.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Laurent Balmelli is a manager at IBM Software Group in charge of
architecting and executing IBM solutions for the industrial sector. He
is a co-author of the SysML specification. Laurent Balmelli received a M.Sc degree in Computer Science in 1996 and a Ph.D from the department of Communication Systems in 2000, both from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is fluent in 6 languages, including Japanese. He is currently based in Tokyo, Japan. He may be contacted via email at balmelli "at" us.ibm.com.