In traditional systems engineering practices, system design and analysis have been carried out using a document-centric approach. In this approach, stakeholders create various documents to represent their perspectives on the mission or system under development. However, the use of natural language documents can lead to inconsistencies and implicit dependencies between views. Additionally, engineering models are often isolated from documents, making it challenging to trace and verify information's consistency. Engineers also spend a significant amount of time searching for up-to-date information from various sources.
The document-centric approach results in a loss of engineering rigor during the transition from design and analysis to document creation. Once documents are produced, the engineering work becomes disconnected from the resulting artifacts. This disconnection can lead to the loss of intellectual property value and significant overhead in maintaining consistency and performing impact analysis.
OpenMBEE, or Open Model Based Engineering Environment, offers an integrated suite of software applications and services to replace information silos with consistent, traceable engineering models and documents. It ensures that information remains consistent and corresponds accurately. OpenMBEE introduces transclusions, which integrate model information within unstructured narrative in model-based documents. This enhances collaboration and mutual consistency between models and documents.
OpenMBEE generates linked-data documents using the Document Generator (DocGen) query language and MDK to gather relevant model data for producing views. These views conform to the IEEE/ISO 42010 view and viewpoint paradigm. The platform seamlessly integrates data extraction and synchronization with various applications and services, adapting to their conventions and workflows. Engineers can edit both the model and document concurrently, reducing duplication of work, ensuring consistency, and enhancing accessibility.
DocGen provides a structured representation of documents while allowing the incorporation of unstructured data into structured engineering data. This approach lowers the modeling barrier and supports model hardening, enabling engineers to add formalism incrementally. Transclusions preserve links to authoritative information sources, maintain traceability, and measure overall information maturity, known as model hardness.
OpenMBEE addresses the challenges of early and late lifecycle modeling, providing a framework for seamless integration of models and structured data into engineering documents.