Towards the reuse of physical models within the development life-cycle: a case study of Simulink models
Author
Abstract

Metadata Discovery Problem - In order to enable a collaborative Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) environment through computer systems, it is completely necessary to enable the possibility of communicating tools (interoperability) and reusing previous engineering designs saving costs and time. In this context, the understanding of the underlying concepts and relationships embedded in the system artifacts becomes a cornerstone to properly exploit engineering artifacts. MBSE tool-chains and suites, such as Matlab Simulink, can be applied to different engineering activities: architecture design (descriptive modeling), simulation (analytical modeling) or verification. Reuse capabilities in specific engineering tools are a kind of non-functional aspect that is usually covered providing a type of search capability based on artifact metadata. In this work, we aim to ease the reuse of the knowledge embedded in Simulink models through a solution called PhysicalModel2Simulink. The proposed approach makes use of an ontology for representing, indexing and retrieving information following a meta-model (mainly to semantically represent concepts and relationships). Under this schema, both meta-data and contents are represented using a common domain vocabulary and taxonomy creating a property graph that can be exploited for system artifact discovery. To do so, a mapping between the Matlab Simulink meta-model and the RSHP (RelationShHiP) meta-model is defined to represent and serialize physical models in a repository. Then, a retrieval process is implemented on top of this repository to allow users to perform text-based queries and look up similar artifacts. To validate the proposed solution, 38 Simulink models have been used and 20 real user queries have been designed to study the effectiveness, in terms or precision and recall, of the proposed solution against the Matlab Simulink searching capabilities.

Year of Publication
2022
Date Published
apr
Publisher
IEEE
Conference Location
Budapest, Hungary
ISBN Number
978-1-66540-601-7
URL
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9789840/
DOI
10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789840
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