Stakeholder Engagement Visualization (EnVision) System for SysML Diagram Exploration

This paper will be of interest to those engaging stakeholders in the participatory modeling process, where a well-formed SysML model is being designed, maintained and revised in Cameo/MagicDraw, yet with a need to engage external stakeholders in the participatory modeling process outside of the modeling environment itself. Effective stakeholder engagement in this context facilitates efficient review of the modeling artifacts (diagrams, allocations, etc.), with an end to identify and eliminate modeling errors, based on the external reviewer’s firsthand knowledge of the system of interest. While MagicDraw supports basic image exports, and while some versions of Cameo support "Web Publisher 2.0" HTML exports, the current feature sets of these types of built-in export packages largely recreate a Cameo-like navigation tree in the browser. These types of export interfaces (for browsing an exported model) are functional and intuitive for system modelers, but less so for external reviewers and stakeholders. Therefore, born out of the need to engage users outside of the modeling environment itself, this paper outlines a system serving as an alternate HTML export method, using Python to generate an interactive HTML visualization for large/multi-tier models. This provides usability features that enable easier end-user navigation of the model artifacts, as well as a novel way to identify and review process/entity allocations at any point within a larger model. The end result is a largely automated export process, resulting in a HTML web visualization package that enables greater stakeholder review in the participatory modeling process.