Simulating SysML models: Overview and challenges

SysML language, proposed by OMG, is a commonly accepted standard to model and study systems-of-systems (SoS). It provides the means to depict SoS components and their behavior in a multi-layer fashion and explore alterative architectures for their design. To validate SysML models in terms of performance criteria, simulation is usually the preferred method employed. To this end, different SysML diagrams are utilized, while numerous simulation methodologies and tools are employed. There are many efforts targeting simulation code generation from SysML models. Model-based system engineering concepts are adopted in most of them to generate simulation models from SysML models. Nevertheless, this process is not standardized, although most of current approaches tend to follow the same steps, even if they employ different tools. The scope of this paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the similarities and differences of existing approaches and identify current challenges in fully automating SysML models simulation process.