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Sophia SALAS CORDERO authoredSophia SALAS CORDERO authored
Model-based to Design Matrix (MB2DM)
Design Matrices Generation Tool
Table of Contents
About MB2DM
MB2DM is a tool to generate Design Matrices from xml files. 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. The presented tool generates design matrices while extracting information automatically from xml model file of the MBSE software TTool, it can also be adapted to extract information from Papyrus models.
The tool is able to create:
- Design Structure Matrix (DSM),
- Domain Mapping Matrix (DMM),
- Multi-Domain Matrix (MDM).
For more information refer to the paper "Design Structure Matrix Generation from Open-source MBSE Tools" available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9582525
Citing
When writing about MB2DM, cite the following paper:
Plain Text
W. Pons, S. Salas Cordero and R. Vingerhoeds, "Design Structure Matrix Generation from Open-source MBSE Tools",
2021 IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE), 2021, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/ISSE51541.2021.9582525.BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{DSMgeneration2021,
author={Pons, William and Salas Cordero, Sophia and Vingerhoeds, Rob},
booktitle={2021 IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE)},
title={Design Structure Matrix Generation from Open-source MBSE Tools},
year={2021},
volume={},
number={},
pages={1-8},
doi={10.1109/ISSE51541.2021.9582525}}Project Status
Usage
The proposed algorithm parses a desired TTool XML file (which describes a model), then stores the information and processes it to obtain DSMs, DMMs, and a MDM. The algorithm can create a Functions DSM using the Use Case Diagram in a model, a Components DSM using the Block Diagram, and a Requirement DSM using the Requirement Diagram. The generated DSMs can be either binary or numeric, as required by the user, the binary ones with "1" where there is a relation, or numeric ones when there is information about the number of inputs/outputs. The former could include directional or non-directional dependencies, depending on what is needed. The later would show directed dependencies. In TTool, only Port Connectors enable to define outputs and inputs through the relation. The MDM contains all the elements of Functions, Components and Requirements DSMs. Only one MDM is created per model.
How to run?
No need to install. Just clone the repository or download the latest release.
Go to the Application folder. It contains both a JAR file and an .exe file. The .jar file can be used with a Java Runtime Environment. The EXE can be used on Windows.
- Choose either the .jar or .exe and click on it
- Select input file
- Select the types of matrices you wish to obtain from the DSM, DMM or MDM tab accordindly
- A message on the history window will appear with the name of the selected matrix
- The output file can be found on the automatically created at Application\design_matrices
Input example files can be found in this TTool repository path, click here to find the MicroWaveOven_SafetySecurity_fullMethodo.xml referred to in the paper.
If you want to create your own models to later use with MB2DM download TTool and get to work. Additionaly, on TTool you can find model example files in the TTool\modeling folder.
Requirements
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Java 8
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Excel (The output files are set as a default to XLSX format, but you can refer to this section if you want to the output files in a CSV format)
Development
The Source Code folder contains the source code of the project. It is a Java project created with Maven.
Packages
The XMLTreatment package parses the XML file with the JDOM API, and then categorize and store the data, using the XMLParser and XMLAnalysis classes.
The XMLAnalyser interacts with the classes of the Analyse and MatrixMaker packages. XMLAnalyser first calls the classes of Analyse to create the relations between the system elements and then calls the classes of MatrixMaker to create the matrices from both the elements and their dependencies.
First, the Analyse package is used. If only a DSM is requested to be built, the classes of the ModelParts package within the Analyse package handle the request and map the dependencies of a DSM. These can be between functions, components, or requirements. It avoids building all the dependencies if they are not requested. If a DMM or a MDM is requested, then all the dependencies are created with the FullModel class. Both the ModelParts and FullModel classes use the Relation class in the package of the same name. This class enables to properly define every kind of dependency between system elements. Each dependency is composed of two members and a connection defined by the Connection class. At this point, are all the diagrams of a SysML model made in TTool are analysed and all their elements and dependencies have been created. To avoid redundancy, ExtendedElement gathers same type elements from different diagrams if they have same name.
Finally, the classes of the MatrixMaker package are called. The Matrix class defines the basis structure of a matrix as a list of lists containing strings of characters. The DSMMaker class uses the results of from a Diagram class to fill a Matrix with the Inputs of dependencies in rows, and the Outputs in columns. The MDMMaker class uses the information of the FullModel class to realise the same work. The DMMMaker class requires a MDM to be built. It extracts the relevant part of data from the MDM. The tables built are then given as arguments to methods of the SheetWriter class, that writes them to files.
Output Format
If the desired format of the output file is not ".xlsx", there are 2 options:
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Use an online converter, or
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Change the code and recompile:
Proceed to modify the following line in the Constants.java file found at Source code\src\main\java\com\MB2DM\Constants
public static final String XLSX = ".xlsx";and verify SheetWriter.java file for consistency.
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.