An ontology for State Analysis: Formalizing the mapping to SysML

• Published in: 2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference pp. 1 - 16
• Main Authors: Wagner, David A., Bennett, M. B., Karban, R., Rouquette, N., Jenkins, S., Ingham, M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.03.2012
• Subjects: Analytical models; Computer architecture; Control systems; Ontologies; Software; Unified modeling language
• ISBN: 1457705567; 9781457705564
• ISSN: 1095-323X; 2996-2358
• DOI: 10.1109/AERO.2012.6187335

State Analysis is a methodology developed over the last decade for architecting, designing and documenting complex control systems. Although it was originally conceived for designing robotic spacecraft, recent applications include the design of control systems for large ground-based telescopes. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) began a project to design the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will require coordinated control of over a thousand articulated mirror segments. The designers are using State Analysis as a methodology and the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) as a modeling and documentation language in this task. To effectively apply the State Analysis methodology in this context it became necessary to provide ontological definitions of the concepts and relations in State Analysis and greater flexibility through a mapping of State Analysis into a practical extension of SysML. The ontology provides the formal basis for verifying compliance with State Analysis semantics including architectural constraints. The SysML extension provides the practical basis for applying the State Analysis methodology with SysML tools. This paper will discuss the method used to develop these formalisms (the ontology), the formalisms themselves, the mapping to SysML and approach to using these formalisms to specify a control system and enforce architectural constraints in a SysML model.