ABSTRACT Architecture development using model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) brings the benefits of efficient and less error‐prone development for complex products. However, today, many enterprises’ existing infrastructures, such as requirements and processes, are not compatible with MBSE technologies. During the migration from such a non‐MBSE environment to an MBSE paradigm, many challenges arise and cause significant modeling difficulties. Dealing with them incorrectly, beyond errors and usability problems, will at least cause prohibitive costs that are likely to lead to program failures and prevent the adoption of MBSE. In this paper, these severe challenges are described, and the methods and strategies for MBSE architecture development for a partially built product are developed. Specifically, an algorithm is devised to find the minimum number of requirements to support the modeling of a specific safety case, a functional element, or a system component. In addition, a strategy and a process are developed to architect the MBSE architecture in an efficient way. With results from a case study of an airplane electrical power system, it is shown that the speed of modeling is significantly improved. This largely increases the chances of meeting early‐stage schedules and avoiding program failures, which can enable further motivation for migrating toward MBSE in the enterprise.
Zhu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.