Thirteen years of SysML: A systematic mapping study

• Sabine Wolny
• Alexandra Mazak
• Christine Carpella
• Verena Geist
• Manuel Wimmer

Context: The OMG standard Systems Modeling Language (SysML) has been on the market for about thirteen years. This standard is an extended subset of UML providing a graphical modeling language for designing complex systems by considering software as well as hardware parts. Over the period of thirteen years, many publications have covered various aspects of SysML in different research firelds. Objective: The aim of this paper is to conduct a systematic mapping study about SysML to identify the different categories of papers, (i) to get an overview of existing research topics and groups, (ii) to identify whether there are any publication trends, and (iii) to uncover possible missing links. Method: We followed the guidelines for conducting a systematic mapping study by Petersen et al. (2015) to analyze SysML publications between 2005 to 2017. Results: Our analysis revealed the following main findings: (i) there is a growing scientific interest on SysML in the last years particularly in the research field of Software Engineering, (ii) SysML is mostly used in the design or validation phase, rather than in the implementation phase, (iii) the most used diagram types are the two new ones requirement diagram and parametric diagram, together with the commonly known block diagram, activity diagram and state machine diagram, (iv) SysML is a specific UML profile mostly used in systems engineering, however, the language has to be customized to accommodate domain-specific aspects, (v) related to collaborations for SysML research over the world, there are more individual research groups than large international networks. Conclusions: This study provides a solid basis for classifying existing approaches for SysML. Researchers can use our results (i) for identifying open research issues, (ii) for a better understanding of the state of the art, and (iii) as a reference for finding specific approaches about SysML.

Context: The OMG standard Systems Modeling Language (SysML) has been on the market for about thirteen years. This standard is an extended subset of UML providing a graphical modeling language for designing complex systems by considering software as well as hardware parts. Over the period of thirteen years, many publications have covered various aspects of SysML in different research firelds. Objective: The aim of this paper is to conduct a systematic mapping study about SysML to identify the di
erent categories of papers, (i) to get an overview of existing research topics and groups, (ii) to identify whether there are any publication trends, and (iii) to uncover possible missing links. Method: We followed the guidelines for conducting a systematic mapping study by Petersen et al. (2015) to analyze SysML publications between 2005 to 2017. Results: Our analysis revealed the following main findings: (i) there is a growing scientific interest on SysML in the last years particularly in the research field of Software Engineering, (ii) SysML is mostly used in the design or validation phase, rather than in the implementation phase, (iii) the most used diagram types are the two new ones requirement diagram and parametric diagram, together with the commonly known block diagram, activity diagram and state machine diagram, (iv) SysML is a specific UML profile mostly used in

systems engineering, however, the language has to be customized to accommodate domain-specific aspects, (v) related to collaborations for SysML research over the world, there are more individual research groups than large international networks. Conclusions: This study provides a solid basis for classifying existing approaches for SysML. Researchers can use our results (i) for identifying open research issues, (ii) for a better understanding of the state of the art, and (iii) as a reference for finding specific approaches about SysML.