Object-oriented systems engineering for infrastructure projects

Object-oriented systems engineering is a model-based approach that is typically associated with SysML and is recommended for software intensive projects. However, the underlying object-oriented concepts, such as inheritance, encapsulation and component reuse, all have great utility on the class of projects that deliver similar functionality across multiple physical sites. This is especially true of infrastructure projects such as railway networks, surveillance networks and other transport networks. Infrastructure projects are not usually software-intensive in the way that military or aerospace projects might be. Therefore, systems engineers in these domains are less likely to be familiar with SysML or perhaps even object-oriented concepts. When introducing these ideas, it would be advantageous to minimise the barriers to adoption by reducing the scope of the learning curve. This paper describes how object-oriented techniques can deliver MBSE advantages in the infrastructure domain without demanding the adoption of SysML. The approach is based on the principle that the barriers to entry into MBSE should be as low as possible. The paper starts by reviewing the key advantages of object-oriented techniques as applied to infrastructure projects, such as abstraction, inheritance, encapsulation and model reuse. It then compares the object-oriented approach to traditional structured analysis and affirms that both approaches are valuable, depending on the type of project being undertaken. A worked example of a network infrastructure projects that benefit from an object-oriented approach is discussed. The paper illustrates the use of abstraction to establish a logical architecture and the use of inheritance to create a physical architecture that represents the nodes of the deployed system. Encapsulation is illustrated through the logical components and alternate architectures are presented to illustrate the benefits of component reuse across the model.