Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect (EA) is generally known as a comprehensive UML modeling (Unified Modeling Language), design and analysis tool for software engineering. But with Enterprise Architect you can do much more: By supporting further modeling languages and integrating project management and product lifecycle capabilities, EA can also be used to fulfill the process requirements for Systems Engineering (Hardware-, Software-, Mechanical Engineering) and Functional Safety Management (FSM), e.g. conform to ISO26262 for automotive/vehicle applications.
The following features are helpful in context of FSM:
At least semi-formal system description The usage of modeling languages and underlying data repositories as supported by Enterprise Architect fulfils the normative requirement of using semi-formal descriptions for safety-critical components (e.g. ASIL D). A formal specification is of course also possible with EA.
Support for Requirement Engineering EA by default supports the definition, management and modeling of requirement elements. This extension allows the users to integrate requirement data into the system specification model and the creation of relationships to other model element, e.g. architectural components or interfaces.
SysML-Support With an additional plugin or starting with the systems engineering edition license, EA supports the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) standard, defined by the OMG. With SysML requirement elements and other useful modeling technologies are introduced in a standardized way. EA supports the complete SysML standard in all versions starting from 1.0 until the current version 1.3.
Muti-user repository Enterprise Architect uses a data base-based repository to store all model data. This repository is enabled for a multi-user and enterprise environment. The member of a project team can work in parallel with the model data and a user right management system and lock-functionalities are included.
Graphical requirement management and link creation With the requirements included in the Enterprise Architect repository it is possible to manage and link requirements to other development artifacts represented in the model in a graphical way. Links can be applied between requirements and other requirements, architectural elements, test cases and many more.
Extendability Enterprise Architect is an extendable modeling platform. With the extension mechanism new modeling language constructs, e.g. for FSM-specific aspects, can be applied to standard UML or SysML. Furthermore EA comes with an application interface and a build in script engine to read, create or modify model data by own tool extensions.
Integration into an existing tool landscape The extension mechanism of EA allows also the coupling and integration of other tools and tool data, still available in a development environment. For FSM this might be a requirement management data base, a FMEA data base, fault tree analysis data and so on.
Visualization of FSM aspects for ASIL-decomposition and safety architectures By integration of FSM attributes into the modeling language and visualization of these aspects, the FSM-related work, e.g. ASIL decomposition, will be supported by the graphical visualization in EA. Possible visualizations for FSM are the assignment and visualization of ASIL-levels for components and port or the coloring of components defined as safety mechanisms. So a safety mechanism can be identified on a diagram on the first sight.
Documentation generation for functional and technical safety concepts Enterprise Architect comes with a powerful documentation generation engine. Furthermore third party tools (e.g. eaDocX) are available to generate sophisticated documentation from the model data. This can be used to generate the functional and technical safety concepts in part or completely from the EA-model.
The described features are only a short overview over the capabilities of EA for usage in an ISO26262 conformal development environment. We will present further details in the future on our blog, but feel free to contact us for further questions. We are able to provide you a wide range of know-how, training and consulting in the area of FSM also for other domains (e.g. medical devices).
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