The digital transformation continues to impact enterprises and the changing nature of systems. Sanford Friedenthal presents MBSE and the Digital Transformation. Mr. Friedenthal has been a leader of the industry standards effort through the Object Management Group (OMG) and INCOSE to develop the Systems Modeling Language (OMG SysML®). He is now co-leading the effort to develop the next generation of SysML (v2).

Digital engineering requires a medium for the capturing of its models in an actionable way. In that arena, SysML is one of the (if not the) most widely used representational choices. If Product Line Engineering (PLE) and digital engineering are going to be applied together, then they have to come together in SysML. SysML has to express the structural and behavioral constructs needed in systems engineering, but it also has to support the feature-based variation required by PLE. The alternative is to live in a pre-PLE world of clone-and-own models for members of a system family.

Sandy’s talk focuses on SysML v2, the next-generation edition of SysML. But, interestingly, in order to rationalize the language, he first gives the language-based perspective on what exactly the so-called digital transformation comprises — accommodating new cyber-physical systems, for example, which were not around (or at least not well-articulated) when v1 was created, or virtual engineering, which is emerging even now.

SysML v2 is not a simple extension of SysML v1. Its designers made a conscious decision to prioritize precision and expressiveness to meet current-day engineering needs over straightforward migration. Seeing how this perspective motivated the language and this decision is, in many ways, as interesting as the language constructs themselves.

Fans of PLE will enjoy Sandy’s explanation of language support for variation points (new in v2) beginning at about the 21-minute mark. Don’t miss this informative presentation. Learn more about SysML and digital transformation.  Watch it here.