Context] Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) comprises a set of models and techniques that is often suggested as solution to cope with the challenges of engineering complex systems. Although many practitioners agree with the arguments on the potential benefits of the techniques, companies struggle with the adoption of MBSE. [Goal] In this paper, we investigate the forces that prevent or impede the adoption of MBSE in companies that develop embedded software systems. We contrast the hindering forces with issues and challenges that drive these companies towards introducing MBSE. [Method] Our results are based on 20 interviews with experts from 10 companies. Through exploratory research, we analyze the results by means of thematic coding.[Results] Forces that prevent MBSE adoption mainly relate to immature tooling, uncertainty about the return-on-investment, and fears on migrating existing data and processes. On the other hand, MBSE adoption also has strong drivers and participants have high expectations mainly with respect to managing complexity, adhering to new regulations, and reducing costs. [Conclusions] We conclude that bad experiences and frustration about MBSE adoption originate from false or too high expectations. Nevertheless, companies should not underestimate the necessary efforts for convincing employees and addressing their anxiety.

Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) advocates the integrated use of models throughout all development phases of a system development life-cycle. It is also often suggested as a solution to cope with the challenges of engineering complex systems. However, MBSE adoption is no trivial task and companies, especially large ones, struggle to achieve it in a timely and effective way. [Goal] We aim to discover what are the best practices and strategies to implement MBSE in companies that develop embedded software systems. [Method] Using an inductive-deductive research approach, we conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with experts from 10 companies. Further, we analyzed the data and drew some conclusions which were validated by an on-line questionnaire in a triangulation fashion. [Results] Our findings are summarized in an empirically validated list of 18 best practices for MBSE adoption and through a prioritized list of the 5 most important best practices. [Conclusions] Raising engineers' awareness regarding MBSE advantages and acquiring experience through small projects are considered the most important practices to increase the success of MBSE adoption.

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In recent years, simulations have proven to be an important means to verify the behavior of complex software systems. The different states of a system are monitored in the simulations and are compared against the requirements specification. So far, system states in natural language requirements cannot be automatically linked to signals from the simulation. However, the manual mapping between requirements and simulation is a time-consuming task. Named-entity Recognition is a sub-task from the field of automated information retrieval and is used to classify parts of natural language texts into categories. In this paper, we use a self-trained Named-entity Recognition model with Bidirectional LSTMs and CNNs to extract states from requirements specifications. We present an almost entirely automated approach and an iterative semi-automated approach to train our model. The automated and iterative approach are compared and discussed with respect to the usual manual extraction. We show that the manual extraction of states in 2,000 requirements takes nine hours. Our automated approach achieves an F1-score of 0.51 with 15 minutes of manual work and the iterative approach achieves an F1-score of 0.62 with 100 minutes of work.

Embedded systems are increasingly equipped with open interfaces that enable communication and collaboration with other embedded systems, thus forming collaborative embedded systems (CESs). This new class of embedded systems, capable of collaborating with each other, is planned at design time and forms collaborative system groups (CSGs) at runtime. When they are part of a collaboration, systems can negotiate tactical goals, with the aim of achieving higher level strategic goals that cannot be achieved otherwise. The design and operation of CESs face specific challenges, such as operation in an open context that dynamically changes in ways that cannot be predicted at design time, collaborations with systems that dynamically change their behavior during runtime, and much more. In this new perspective, simulation techniques are crucially important to support testing and evaluation in unknown environments. In this chapter, we present a set of challenges that the design, testing, and operation of CESs face, and we provide an overview of simulation methods that address those specific challenges.