A Road-Map to Readily Available Early Validation and Verification of System Behaviour in Model-Based Systems Engineering using Software Engineering Best Practices

In this article, we discuss how we can facilitate the growing need for early validation and verification (V&V) of system behaviour in Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSyE). Several aspects, such as reducing cost and time to market, push companies towards integration of V&V methods earlier in development to support effective decision-making. One foundational methodology seeing increased attention in industry is the use of MBSyE, which brings benefits of models with well-defined syntax and semantics to support V&V activities, rather than relying on natural language text documentation. Despite their promise, industrial adoption of these practices is still challenging. This article presents a vision for readily available early V&V . We present a summary of the literature on early V&V in MBSyE and position existing challenges regarding potential solutions and future investigations towards this vision. We elaborate our vision by means of challenges with a specific emphasis on early V&V of system behaviour . We identify three specific challenge areas: Creating and managing Models , Organisational systems engineering aspects, and early V&V Methods . Finally, we outline a road-map to address these categories of challenges, in which we propose the transfer of established best practices from the software engineering domain to support emerging technologies in the systems engineering domain.