Thirteen years of SysML: A systematic mapping study

We have a very close cooperation with academia, one of the last results is a very interesting study by Sabine Wolny and other as part of there work at the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Model-Integrated Smart Production.

Here is a short excerpt from Sabine – full story here

The Christian Doppler Laboratory for Model-Integrated Smart Production investigates the usage of modelling for engineering intelligent production facilities as well as the development of modelling languages which are able to deal with operational production information collected at runtime. In this context, we also explore the the state of the art, current developments, and application of Systems Modeling Language (SysML). This OMG standard has been on the market for about thirteen years. SysML is an extended subset of UML providing a graphical modeling language for designing complex systems by considering software as well as hardware. By conducting a systematic mapping study about SysML we aimed for

• getting an overview of existing research topics and groups
• identifying whether there are any publication trends
• uncovering possible missing links

Our analysis revealed the following main findings:

• There is a growing scientific interest in SysML in the last years particularly in the research field of Software Engineering.
• SysML is mostly used in the design and validation phases, rather than in the implementation phase.
• The most commonly used diagram types are the SysML specific requirement diagram, parametric diagram and block diagram, together with the activity diagram and state machine diagram reused from UML.
• SysML is a specific UML profile mostly used in systems engineering, however, the language has been customized to accommodate domain-specific aspects.
• Related to collaborations for SysML research over the world, there are more individual research groups than large international networks.

We (Sabine Wolny, Alexandra Mazak, Christine Carpella, Verena Geist, Manuel Wimmer) published our systematic mapping study about SysML in the journal Software and Systems Modeling and presented at Models 2019 in Munich (Slides).