Parametrics

April 5, 2016
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Efficiency in healthcare delivery has long been a target of systems engineering and operations analysis effort. Improvements in emergency room care, for example, can lead to better outcomes and better patient experience while reducing the cost of care. In this post, we apply simple parametric analysis to testing medical facility staffing and supply against requirements,

March 31, 2016
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InterCAX and Georgia Tech collaborate to provide a lot of MBSE and SysML training.  After the introductory course on SysML language, new modelers are inclined to ask, “What next?” They are looking for guidance on how to start using modeling for their own work.  They want a process, a methodology, even a template, and these

March 22, 2016
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In this fifth and final installment, we look at two examples from the important domains of CAD and simulation to illustrate the “Internet-of-Tools” concept as applied to our Smart Home Internet-of-Things model. In the first example, a CAD model is linked to structural blocks in the SysML model of the 4 Room Smart Home, so that changes

February 6, 2016
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The Internet of Things (IoT) holds enormous promise of new capabilities for users and new opportunities for businesses. It also presents enormous challenges to systems engineers. Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) potentially provides an efficient way to address those challenges, being holistic, integrated, flexible and object-oriented. To explore this promise, Intercax has started a series of

December 20, 2015
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MySQL (Oracle) databases are widely used in the engineering world to store libraries of components that may be used across many diverse projects. This information is very useful for system engineers composing system architecture models (e.g. in SysML) from reusable building block library elements. A simple import of data is not enough to ensure that values of

November 12, 2015
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Excel tables are small, inexpensive databases that are easy to modify for small teams of engineers, and which may contain libraries of components or tables of functions. Many engineering projects utilize tables in Excel that contain much of the same information that is needed by system engineers to model structure and interconnections in SysML. However,

October 16, 2015
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The Martian by Andrew Weir (2014) is a great read and now a hit movie. The astronaut hero and the expert SysML modeler have several things in common. First, they have the ability to take a complex system and adapt and reuse its components to new purposes. Second, both do careful calculations of system performance

September 14, 2015
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Advanced Model-Based System Engineering MBSE organizations are moving beyond the use of modeling to make “pretty pictures”. SysML parametrics are a way to add spreadsheet-like calculations to descriptive architectural diagrams. And roll-up calculations are among the most common use cases in systems engineering. Starting with a multi-level bill-of-materials or master equipment list, we want to calculate

April 26, 2015
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as turbines are common components in systems for flight and power generation. A whitepaper developed by Dr. Dirk Zwemer (Intercax) and Nidal Kochrad (Université de Sherbrooke) titled “Case Study: A SysML Gas Turbine Parametric Model” illustrates how to model and analyze a gas turbine using SysML. The whitepaper shows the use of SysML parametrics to model

March 20, 2015
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The Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) workshop held at the INCOSE International Workshop in Torrance, CA, USA (Jan 24-25, 2015) hosted a tool vendor challenge in the Model Lifecycle Management track. The challenge problem was the design of a configurable UAV platform that can be used for developing UAVs for different missions, ranging from security and