1 Towards a Standardised Systems Engineering Information Model

Data exchange capabilities of contemporary systems engineering tools are, on the whole, limited. The main reason for this is the effort required for implementing tool to tool data exchange ‘bridges’, and the large number of tools available on the market. This paper is one in a suite of three papers presenting the results of the Esprit 20496 - SEDRES. The objective of the project has been to provide the groundwork for a systems engineering information exchange standard within the ISO 10303 (STEP) framework. The companion paper by Johnson et al. (Johnson et al., 1999] provides an overview of the project and a report on the results of SEDRES. In this paper, the focus is on presenting the structure, scope and plans for future extensions of the SEDRES information model. The SEDRES information model has been specifically developed to facilitate data exchange between systems engineering tools. It has also been put forward as input for the standardisation work, that in due time will result in a STEP Application protocol for systems engineering – Application protocol 233.