Background

Engineering of cyber-physical systems (such as aircraft, aviation infrastructure, satellites, transportation systems, and other heavily complex and heavily automated systems) is undergoing a paradigm change. System design specifications & architecture diagrams stored in word document processing software (such as MS Word, Markdown) and diagramming software (such as MS Powerpoint, MS Visio, Draw.io) that can be interpreted by humans only are getting replaced by system design & architecture specifications expressed in both machine- & human-interpretable ‘software-like’ language ‘SysML v2’. SysML v2 is a brand-new systems engineering modeling language set to revolutionize the engineering of cyber-physical systems, developed by a consortium of industry leaders such as IBM, Siemens, Dassault Systems, as well as Sensmetry, which is developing ‘Syside’, the most modern, performant, and popular SysML v2 tool suite on the market. SysML v2 & Syside combined unlocks the ‘System as Code’ paradigm to create superior systems many times faster by enabling the automation of systems engineering activities that are traditionally done manually by human engineers, creating and processing system specifications and design. Sensmetry’s Syside has over 10000 users and is already used by aerospace leaders (such as Airbus, German Aerospace Agency, European Space Agency) as well as leading car and farming companies making software-defined vehicles.

Why?

The ‘System as Code’ paradigm is difficult to grasp intuitively and requires a hands-on experience for both traditional systems engineers and educational institutions. This is because access is needed to the full ‘System as Code’ IT infrastructure, as well as knowledge about a specific complex system, the knowledge that stays behind closed doors at leading companies. Thus, to educate about the ‘System as Code’ paradigm and its benefits in a hands-on way, this has to be applied to a cyber-physical system development infrastructure that is comprehensible & accessible to all while still having the main characteristics of a more complex system. LEGO Robotics is a perfect cyber-physical system development kit for the task, easy enough for secondary school students to grasp and scriptable using Python (so is Syside which provides both low- and high-level Python APIs to manipulate and interact with systems models).

What?

The project aim is to create is to create a showcase of the ‘System as Code’ paradigm workflows enabled by SysML v2 and Syside applied to cyber-physical systems created from a Lego Robotics kit. The showcase would create requirements and system architecture, and behavioural specification models, which will be processed by Syside for automated verification as well as controls software generation. The work will include 1) using SysML v2 to model (create executable specifications) of LEGO robots, as well as 2) to process these system models programmatically using Python & Syside Automator to automatically generate LEGO robot control and monitoring software utilizing the Python API of Lego Robotics. At a high level, the aim is to illustrate how the typically manual activities in the systems engineering process (see activities in the V-model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-model) can be streamlined & sped up utilising the SysML v2 & Syside tool suite. The goal is to publicly publish the produced artifacts (SysML v2 packages) as open-source and on sysand.org, the package manager for the SysML v2 ecosystem. Sysand is an open-source project maintained by Sensmetry and provides an equivalent package management infrastructure for SysML v2 as pip+PyPI or Anaconda for Python, npm for JavaScript, and alike. You will become an evangelist of the ‘System as Code’ paradigm!

About company

Sensmetry provides products and solutions to make reliable systems faster, cheaper, and better. We achieve this through a model-based approach enabling digital thread and Digital Twin across the system lifecycle. Our flagship product, Syside, leads the System-as-Code paradigm shift with SysML v2.

www. sensmetry.com