Smart Home Internet of Things (IoT) Part 2 – Functional Design to Procurement
December 20, 2015
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 technote series, we described an MBSE process going from requirements specification to a detailed multi-level functional design of a Smart Home IoT system.

In this technote (Part 2), we will:

  • define a structure for the system, initially with a reference architecture independent of the specific home or IoT product choices.
  • check that the functions fully map to the structure, both at the component and interface levels.
  • add executable parametric calculations to the reference model that will apply to multiple configurations (using ParaMagic),
  • draw IoT device product data from a MySQL database into the SysML model (using Syndeia)

 Reference architecture for a Smart Home IoT system as a SysML block definition diagram (BDD)Smart Home BDDSysML activity model for the top-level Control Home activity with object flow -> item flow allocations

Smart Home Activity Model Allocated

Interconnections and item flows in the Smart Home shown using SysML internal block diagram (IBD)

Home Block IBD

SysML parametric model for Smart Home HVAC power analysis

Power Analysis Parametrics

SysML parametric model for room HVAC power, as part of Smart Home HVAC Power Analysis

Power Analysis Parametrics 2

Drawing IoT device data from a MySQL database to the system architecture using Syndeia
Smart Home components in MySQL

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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.