Design Structure Matrix Generation from Open-source MBSE Tools

Abstract

The usage of Design Structure Matrices is widely applied to represent, cluster, and partition complex systems information for different purposes, one of them being systems design. Nevertheless, open-source software for their automatic creation is rare. This leads to manual workshop sessions for subject matter experts to fill in the design structure matrices, a practice that is very tedious and time consuming. The importance and application of Model Based System Engineering has increased over the years. Nowadays, there are several open-source MBSE software such as StarUML, Papyrus, TTool, Modelio, Capella. This paper describes a novel approach to generate design structure matrices and extract information automatically from xml and xmi formats used widely in open-source Model Based System Engineering tools. This work presents the algorithm and a tool to extract data from the output model files, in order to automatically create a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) of modeled systems.