Correlating Logical and Physical Models for Early Performance Validation - An Experience Report

This paper reports on efforts to improve collaboration, traceability, and integrated analysis across development teams in Systems Engineering (SE), namely systems architecting (modeling) and systems verification (simulation) in an industrial SE workflow. Higher process safety and efficiency demand seamless integration between these historically separated domains that handle different levels of detail and maturity with corresponding models. A practical gap is the level of information needed for physical simulation, contra the specified logical system descriptions from a functional perspective in system architectures. We demonstrate a cross-domain collaboration by aligning system interfaces across model abstractions in an integrated tooling approach, augmenting logical models with physical information. We utilize an industrial use case to make the paper more concrete and, in addition to the initial results, report on the lessons learned throughout the design process application and open challenges in real-life continuous engineering environments.