Israeli group proposes path to Internet of Things

Systems engineering is the technique used for planning and managing the huge array of materials, manpower, methods and flows required in modern manufacturing and construction projects. 

As system complexity grew in recent years, a paradigm known as model-based systems engineering (MBSE) emerged. MBSE makes use of conceptual models to enable describing the requirement and design of systems in a formal yet understandable way. A variety of computer languages is used to construct conceptual models.

The increasing integration of computer software and hardware into the design, production and merchandising of goods, and into societal interactions themselves––known variously as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) and the Internet of Things (IoT)––now poses new challenges to systems engineers. 

A recent paper from Israel’s Technion University addresses the shifts that must take place in in model-based systems engineering to adapt to these changes. The study, “Improving Conceptual Modeling with Object-Process Methodology Stereotypes,” appears in the journal Applied Sciences on March 5, 2021.

The authors, Hanan Kohen and Dov Dori, are from the faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion––Israel Institute of Technology. Dori is the inventor of Object-Process Methodology (OPM) and first published in 1995.

Object-Process Methodology

Engineers involved in system design must adapt previous techniques to take account of these widespread changes, the authors argue, especially as they relate to the incorporation of software into hardware. 

To accomplish this shift, the authors advocate the adoption of the conceptual modeling language known as Object-Process Methodology (OPM).

According to the authors, the benefits of model-based approaches over mathematical, physical, and geometrical modeling include, reduction of risks, early error detection and prevention, team communication enhancement, traceability and an explicit methodology for reasoning about the system

The OPM language builds on these advantages to create a formal yet intuitive approach to help engineers develop and represent complex systems. 

One area of concern that Object-Process Methodology can address is the difficulties created by the proliferation of proprietary solutions to systems design that are often incompatible with adjacent systems. “As a result,” the authors explain, “distributed systems, which span various domains and enterprises, become ever more complicated, posing maintenance challenges, and making it difficult to collaborate and exchange data globally.”

Focus on stereotypes

Another area of concern is the widespread misuse of a modeling construct known as a stereotype, in many systems designs. 

A stereotype, the authors explain, is a construct introduced into the Unified Modeling Language (UML) “to enable modelers to extend the basic UML metamodel structure without modifying the metamodel itself.” According to the authors, stereotypes are often introduced “where regular domain- level modeling would be more appropriate.”

This could be cured, they argue, by innovations in Object-Process Methodology which would embody a “robust stereotyping mechanism.” Their recent study focuses on how to go about that.  

One innovation is to show how OPM stereotypes could be recursively extended by other OPM stereotypes, which saves modeling time, reduces error and improves compatibility of systems. 

Another innovation is to demonstrate how to adapt OPM to a cloud-based software environment known as OPCloud, in a way that allows system administrators to create and edit global stereotypes in addition to creating and editing stereotypes for his or her own organization. 

“As future work we plan to extend stereotypes to processes and to multi-OPD [Object-Process Diagrams] models and provide for stereotype inheritance,” the authors write. Two different student groups will be used to carry out an experiment that will assess the impact of OPM stereotypes. 

Hardware-software co-design 

“Traditionally, systems engineers have not been software experts,” they note. 

The development of software embedded in systems has been the role of specialized software engineers and programmers. 

Systems engineers first define the systems, and only later is the software development delegated to specialists who often lack system level-understanding. 

“The need for a paradigm shift in the development of software-intensive systems,” the authors note, “is growing hand-in-hand with the intertwined embedding of software within hardware in current advanced ‘smart’ systems and almost all future systems, which can increasing be classified as IoT [Internet of Things] systems.”

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Kohen & Dori. Improving Conceptual Modeling with Object-Process Methodology Stereotypes, Applied Sciences (2021).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/app11052301