Last time, in Part I, we discussed what emergent behavior is, where it ultimately originates from, and why unintended emergence is hard to mitigate when not caught early. We also introduced the Cha-Cha-Cha investigative approach utilized primarily in the scientific community and tailored it for use in systems engineering and …

Part II of this series may be found here. Acclaimed systems thinker Donella Meadows has defined a system as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.” David Peter Stroh has elaborated upon this definition of a system to note that systems achieve …

Although modeling has always played a role in engineering, it has become a central focus with the advent of model-based systems engineering. While we as engineers are focused on engineering and building systems, sometimes the topic of modeling, as both an art and a science, still gets short shrift. If …

Last week, in Part 1 of this series, I described how GENESYS displays SysML block features in compartments on block nodes. This week I’ll continue the discussion and describe how GENESYS deals with the SysML relationships of composition, references, generalization, and dependencies on a Block Definition Diagram, or BDD. Blocks …