A system concept representation framework and its testing on patents, urban architectural patterns, and software patterns

Abstract

The development of a concept for a system is a key step toward creating the system's architecture. Most previous concept development approaches focus on the procedures for the conceptual design activity—the sequence of activities and tasks. Our work is motivated by the desire to elaborate in details the notional content of a system concept and to provide the means of encoding and analyzing it in a digital environment. The objective of this work is to develop a system concept representation framework that can systematically represent the concept's constituents, their definitions, and interconnections. In order to demonstrate the utility of this framework, we have conducted three studies: mapped eight selected US patents, nine selected urban architectural patterns, and three selected software patterns to the framework. Patents, urban architectural patterns, and software patterns each contain a rich body of knowledge about the system they describe, and therefore they must logically contain a description of the concepts underlying them. We show that the main features of proposed framework can be found in patents, urban architectural patterns, and software patterns. The major utility of the framework is that it provides the means to encode existing system concepts and to inform the conceptual design of new systems, contributing to the INCOSE Model‐Based Conceptual Design initiative.

MedTech Product Development Framework for Post-Pandemic Era

“…By the moment of design interviews setup, the company already completed a project aiming at the development of an intramuscular injector device (to be discussed in sub-section 4.1) following its own conventional design process. The design team members of this project were interviewed using the system concept representation framework (Menshenin and Crawley, 2020) (the framework is to be discussed in sub-section 4.2). At the next step, the IDEF0 (Presley and Liles, 1995) diagram for Level 1 was built.…”

“…Therefore, in some cases the discussion related to a specific question could last 20 minutes. The definitions of each entity from (Figure 1) are contained in the previously published work (Menshenin and Crawley, 2020).…”

Towards Context-Awareness in Model-Based Requirements Engineering

“…CAMBRE is integrated into conceptual modeling, which allows for continued discussion, elaboration, and solution design to realize the requirements, as part of the same modeland the two are integrated, rather than detached. CAMBRE follows conceptual architecture theory described in [28], a derived concept representation framework [29], and a more rigorous model-based system architecting framework [30]. It consists of elaborating the conceptual architecture in five domains: a) stakeholder needs, b) solutionneutral domain, c) solution-specific domain, d) integrated concept domain, and e) operations domain.…”

“…According to [29,30] needs are defined in the Stakeholders domain and they are separate from requirements. Requirements are defined in the solution-neutral domain and solutions are defined in the solution-specific domain.…”

Analysis of Systems Structural Relationships Through a DSM-Based Approach

“…For instance, the "Portafilter" is used for transferring a liquid coffee. The representations in Figure 3 and (Menshenin and Crawley, 2020). This environment is responsible for the representation of an abstracted nature of the system.…”