Controlled modeling environment using flexibly-formatted spreadsheets

Abstract

As modeling in software and system development becomes increasingly prevalent, many engineers need to collaboratively develop models spanning many disciplines such as requirements management, system design, software, etc. However, integrating modeling languages for various disciplines is challenging, because UML and SysML are too complex for many engineers to understand. Therefore, in complicated engineering processes, engineers with different areas of expertise often find it difficult to access the same information in different domain-specific modeling environments. Our approach to address this problem is to share and edit the models as task-oriented spreadsheets, using a unified model (in UML or SysML) and a unified user interface (in the spreadsheet program). The formats of the spreadsheets are optimized for various tasks while the target models remain in a unified modeling language. Since the transformation between the spreadsheets and the models is automated and transparent, users do not have to be skilled with the modeling languages to edit the spreadsheets. Using our novel approach, we were able to reduce the errors and time, and also the difficulty for each task without providing specialized training for the engineers. A preliminary user study showed that, by applying the spreadsheet-based approach, we could reduce the number of errors with less time for typical systems engineering tasks.