Broadcast date: December 18th, 2021

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Welcome to the 18th door of our MBSE Podcast Advent Calendar. Today, we take a look at the modeling of profiles and stereotypes.

Typically, you cannot use SysML out of the box very well. The language is too general to provide enough words to talk about a concrete system. For example, SysML defines a block, but not a system, subsystem, component, module, domain block, software block, and so forth. Or SysML defines a requirement with only three properties name, id, and text, but neither functional requirements nor performance requirements nor requirement properties like a priority, motivation, or a list of risks. 

It is intended that you extend SysML with a more specific vocabulary that fits your needs. 

Let’s have a look at how we did it in our model. 

Besides others, our model applies the SYSMOD profile. A profile defines an extension of SysML. The profile application relationship makes the extension available for the model.

The profile is similar to a package and contains stereotypes. A stereotype extends an existing SysML element. It provides a name and semantics and can provide additional properties and notation. 

The following diagram shows some stereotypes of the SYSMOD profile, which extends the SysML block. 

The <<system>> stereotype specializes the SysML Block and adds two properties to store the problem statement and system idea of the system. 

The SYSMOD stereotypes define different actor categories like external systems, environmental effects, and so on, and as well as it introduces a new notation. Therefore, the actor can be depicted by cubes in the system context.

Typically, the first step before modeling stereotypes is creating a concept model of the new concepts. 

As one example, this block definition diagram shows the concepts of variant modeling terms from the VAMOS approach. VAMOS stands for “Variant Modeling with SysML”. 

The VAMOS stereotypes, which are part of the SYSMOD profile, are derived from this concept model. 

We will have a more detailed look at variant modeling tomorrow. 

So much for the 18th door of our MBSE Podcast Advent Calendar. We wish you a great 18th of December.

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