Smart Home Internet of Things (IoT) Part 3 – Procurement to Evaluation
February 6, 2016
Blog

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 technical notes on modeling the Smart Home, a well-known example of the IoT, using MBSE, SysML and Syndeia, an integration platform linking systems engineering to the rest of the engineering process.

Smarthome

In Part 1 of this series, we described an MBSE process going from requirements specification to a detailed multi-level functional design. In Part 2 we created a structural reference architecture, allocated functions to structural elements, added parametric modeling for cost and power consumption, and imported IoT component product data from external databases

In this technote (Part 3), we will:

  • create a specific configuration, a four-room home,
  • check functionality against the reference model,
  • build a complete four-room IBD connection model,
  • evaluate cost and power consumption using the embedded parametric models (with ParaMagic) and
  • use the final design to create a Bill of Materials in a commercial PLM system (using Syndeia).

The next notes in the series describe how this model can link to models of different type and scale, including CAD models of the home, time-varying simulation models, and larger SysML models, e.g. the Smart Grid for electrical power.

 Reference architecture for a Smart Home IoT system as a SysML block definition diagram (BDD)Smart Home BDD4Rm Home BDD, showing redefinition of part properties for the generic components in the Reference Architecture 

4RmHomeBDD

4 Rm Audio Subsystem block definition diagram, showing specialization and subsetting of audio components

AudioSpecializations

ParaMagic Browser for IoT System Cost (left) and Power Consumption (right), after solution

CostPowerPar

Syndeia dashboard in preparation for building Bill-of-Materials in Teamcenter PLM

BuildingTCBoM

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About Author

Dirk Zwemer

Dr. Dirk Zwemer (dirk.zwemer@intercax.com) is COO and Co-founder of Intercax LLC (Atlanta, GA), a supplier of MBE engineering software platforms like Syndeia and ParaMagic. He is an active teacher and consultant in the field and holds Level 4 Model Builder-Advanced certification as an OMG System Modeling Professional.