Models and tools for supporting sustainability assessment in Systems Engineering

Since several years, sustainability has become a very important challenge for our societies. Our lifestyles are in the process of making our planet uninhabitable because of the various impacts that we, as human beings, are inflicting on it. As part of these impacts, we focus on Complex Systems designed by humans. It is of uttermost importance to be able to analyze and design complex systems so that the sustainability features are taken into account. More specifically, the contribution of this article is to propose models and tools for the assessment of systems sustainability during the analysis and design phases. The analysis and design of systems may be difficult tasks. It is even more so for complex systems. Since decades, the System Engineering (SE) field has given birth to a family of systemic and multidisciplinary approaches for the design of systems. Among SE approaches, Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE) is a special kind of SE that relies on formalized models as first-class citizens deliverables for all analysis and design activities from requirements elicitation to final design and validation. SysML (Systems Modelling Language) is one of these MBSE approaches. SysML is a well-known, general purpose graphical systems modelling language that supports SE approaches. In addition, SysML allows its own language extension by the creation of new concepts and diagrams. This extension mechanism is known as Domain Specific Modelling Language (DSML). The contributions presented in this paper consist in the definition of an extension of SysML that provides models and tools in order to assess the sustainability of systems during analysis and design. This extension of SysML is based upon a technique, named profile, and proposes new modelling concepts for taking into consideration sustainability issues during systems engineering. Moreover, these new model elements are supported by software tools issued from the MBSE domain and allow the development of ad-hoc software tooling support.