The Framework for the Evaluation of MBSE Methodologies for Practitioners (FEMMP) has been developed to support end-users in the selection process for their individual challenges. It also aims to provide a common platform to collect, compare, and discuss the various methodologies available. A methodology is defined as a combination of processes, tools, and people In MBSE. There is also the question of the modeling language. Though SysML is becoming the standard MBSE language, alternatives are available that might allow for a more efficient approach in a particular context. Also, SysML is often extended to adapt it to the domain-specific semantics, so that many variations of the standard exist across the community.
A practical methodology must be a) focused on product development, either for innovation, documentation, refactoring, or reverse-engineering, b) fully documented and supported, and c) mature enough to be readily applied to at least one common scenario from industry or public engineering projects.
The FEMMP defines a catalogue of criteria against which the methodologies are assessed. These are grouped by areas and allow the independent evaluation of the process, the quality of the model, its practical implementation in a tool, and how well it can be applied to a standard case study.
The assessment shall provide an overview for the practitioner without the ambition to rank the methodologies objectively. It is therefore kept simple by evaluating the criteria in a simple yet appropriate way, e.g. yes/no, with a list, or by selecting an index from a standard scale. The objective is to successively replace lists and possibly scales with Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and to substantiate the evaluation results by user feedback and survey results.
For more information on FEMMP, you can read a draft of the original publication, which compares SYSMOD by Tim Weilkiens and the now obsolete MDDM by projectglobe Ltd. Additional evaluations can be found in the draft of our latest FEMMP paper, featuring Dov Dori’s OPM, Martin Hoppe’s RePoSyd, Vitech’s Strata, and Thales’ Arcadia.