Investigating Risks in Systems Engineering Tool Data Exchange

摘要

Data exchange capabilities are generally regarded as a desirable (but in many cases absent) property of systems engineering tools. While such capabilities are desirable it is also the case that there is a substantial risk that tool data exchange impose modifications to the data transferred. In this paper we illustrate how modifications are introduced based on the capabilities of individual tools, present an analysis of potentially adversary effects of data exchanges and discuss measures for preventing data exchange related errors from being introduced in a specification. The paper also discusses requirements for data exchange information models for heterogeneous domains to support representation of multiple semantic variants of basic concepts. Aspects of the emerging ISO standard AP-233 is evaluated against these requirements and an example is presented to illustrate the point.