Considerations for model curation in model-centric systems engineering

Contemporary systems are often highly complex sociotechnical systems that require models to help system engineers with sense-making and decision-making. The systems community has developed and instantiated many modeling approaches, practices, formal languages and toolsets, which are all areas of progress. If models and their instantiations could be managed as assets, documented, archived, protected, retrieved and re-used as such, modeling and analysis tasks would likely gain in quality and timeliness. This paper asks the question "What would a curator need to know about models or their instantiations to provide a model curation function"? Considerations of the activities and body of knowledge associated with curation of models are presented. The potential usefulness of a curated system modeling approach is illustrated in an example.