From: Friedenthal, Sanford
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004 1:42 PM
To: syseng@omg.org
Cc: BurkhartRogerM@johndeere.com;
juren@jpl.nasa.gov
Subject: SE DSIG Meeting in
St Louis - April 27-28, 2004 - Summary

SE DSIG Members,

The following is a brief summary of our SE DSIG meetings at the OMG meeting in St Louis on April 27-28. This email and the reference document will be available on the SE DSIG site at http://syseng.omg.org.

Sandy and Roger presented the current status of SysML in response to the UML for SE RFP issued in March 2003. The presentation (syseng/2004-04-02) will be available on the SE DSIG site and includes a summary of the SysML requirements and design approach and the primary SysML extensions to UML 2.  The SysML specification is still an early draft with the revised submission to be submitted to the OMG on August 2, 2004. A follow-up review is scheduled with INCOSE/AP-233 members on May 25, 2004 in Pasadena, California.

The SE DSIG met jointly with the Manufacturing and Industrial Systems (MANTIS) DTF from 1430 to 1500 on Tuesday, April 27, 2004.  This meeting was a followup to a joint meeting held at the previous meeting at Anaheim in which areas of joint interest to both groups had been identified.  Roger Burkhart provided a recap of these areas, which include the relation of OMG activities to those of STEP (ISO 10303), and CAD Services and Knowledge-Based Engineering activities on the MANTIS roadmap.  The PLM Services specification just recommended for adoption by the MANTIS TF relies on mappings between UML and EXPRESS according to STEP Part 25 that will also be of interest in mapping UML for Systems Engineering to its related STEP modules.  These are being developed as part of the AP233 group within STEP.  AP233 also makes heavy use of Product Data Management modules which have been translated to UML as part of PLM Services.  Jim U'Ren of NASA JPL, chair of AP233 and also active in the UML for SE work, continues to coordinate the relation of the UML for SE activity to STEP.  A discussion of the CAD Services specification clarified its potential role in providing an interface to attributes about geometric models managed by a CAD system.  An overview of a draft RFP for Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) by Russ Claus indicated a potential for alignment with multiple Systems Engineering interests including design rules and parametric relationships and their use to drive optimization and tradeoff analysis.


The SE DSIG met jointly with the Business Enterprise Integration DTF (BEI DTF) from 9:00-12:00 on Wednesday, April 28, 2004.  Before beginning the joint meeting discussions, Fred Cummins of the BEI DTF reviewed a revised draft of an Organization Structure Metamodel (OSM) RFP to be issued by the BEI DTF.  The potential for reuse of common concepts of organization structure and roles between human organizations and engineered systems was noted during this discussion.  Roger Burkhart then provided a recap of the discussion between the two groups that had begun at Anaheim, in which multiple areas of potential joint interest between the two groups had been identified.  These included the potential for common concepts of organization and structure, the differences between process models for collaboration vs. execution, vocabularies for requirements and business rules, and the range of requirement types for business or engineering systems.  On the BEI DTF roadmap, submitter teams are merging their proposals for process models as part of the Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) and their results may provide a basis to explore the relation of collaborative process models to models of structure and flow needed for systems engineering.  The Business Semantics of Business Rules (BSBR) RFP is also going through revised submissions which may provide a basis for defining vocabularies in which rules are stated, which could apply to the statement of requirements in systems engineering.  The BEI DTF held a discussion earlier in the week regarding strategic planning from the Business Rules Forum (based on a paper at www.businessrulesgroup.org/second_paper/BRF-BRMM.pdf).  The relation of business strategic planning and models of motivation and goals in business to the statement of requirements in engineered systems was discussed with a suggestion to look at this related material.

Sanford Friedenthal
OMG SE DSIG Chair
Lockheed Martin Corp
(703) 293-5557