Although MBSE has not been part of my professional experience, I was recently introduced to how advanced these tools are in some categories of complex systems design and engineering. I understand that when these systems are well and completely implemented within and between all of the teams and organizations, they become fully integrated into all phases of systems development and deployment. Many systems failures are likely traceable to integration problems at the system engineering level.
I understand and agree that the Cardano folks working on formalisms are also doing systems modelling at some level. My question is how does the leadership of the foundation see all of this developing in the long term. As an open source developer with an understanding of the systems engineering concepts I realize that our practice in general doesn’t involve the toolchains of enterprise level MBSE even though there are some tools.
The problem for open IP in general is that it is really hard to develop professional quality designs and implementations without using costly professional engineering tools. Linus Torvalds first got his foundation some permission to use bitkeeper, but in the end he created git as the definitive OS tool for change management.
Do we use the professional tools and invest in the professional tools, maybe buy them for as OS design commons? In my explorations, on interesting OS tool stood out Umple:
https://cruise.eecs.uottawa.ca/umple/
In general I think we need to create a new toolchain for OSMBSE that interoperates with the professional tools as much as possible. A big part of this toolchain is about code generation from models. Since you can generate in many ways, this can support simulation, testing and many other phases of development. The important parts of this tools chain is mathematical model simulators and code generators. Something like Umple could be a great “connector tool” in this space.
I’m very interested in how others are thinking about this and what your experience of MBSE has been.