7.2.1 Building Bridges Between Systems and Software with SysML and UML

Systems are becoming increasingly reliant on software. One of the roles of the systems engineer is to perform a trade-off analysis of the different architectural solutions to a problem, and allocate requirements to different engineering domains within that solution, including software. It is important to investigate effective ways of establishing traceability from the system definition to the software and other requirements. The Systems Engineering Language, (SysML), which is based on the Unified Modeling language (UML), is being increasingly used by systems engineers to model systems. As well as providing system requirements, SysML models can be used to define the system architecture to be used by the software engineers. In this paper, we will demonstrate how SysML and UML can effectively work together to provide an effective handover between systems and software.