Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is a formalized methodology that is used to support the requirements, design, analysis, verification, and valid

Software Engineering Institute

submited by
Style Pass
2023-06-04 04:00:06

Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is a formalized methodology that is used to support the requirements, design, analysis, verification, and validation associated with the development of complex systems. In contrast to document-centric engineering, MBSE puts models at the center of system design. The increased adoption of digital-modeling environments during the past few years has led to increased adoption of MBSE. In January 2020, NASA noted this trend by reporting that MBSE, "has been increasingly embraced by both industry and government as a means to keep track of system complexity." In this blog post, I provide a brief introduction to MBSE.

One area of concern within complex systems is cybersecurity. The SEI CERT Division has begun researching how MBSE can be used to mitigate security risks early in the system-development process so that systems are secure by design, in contrast to the common practice of adding security features later in the development process. Capturing system attributes in models enables systems engineers to perform threat-modeling analysis of the system early and incorporate mitigation strategies into the system design, thereby reducing the system's overall security-related risks.

MBSE in a digital-modeling environment provides advantages that document-based systems engineering cannot provide. For example, in a document-based approach, many documents are generated by different authors to capture the system's design from various stakeholder views, such as system behavior, software, hardware, safety, security, or other disciplines. Using a digital-modeling approach, a single source of truth for the system is built in which discipline-specific views of the system are created using the same model elements.

Leave a Comment