MBSE and FMEA Integration Using GENESYS

Since the concept of MBSE was formally proposed as a part of the Systems Engineering Vision 2020 at INCOSE 2007, MBSE has been gaining more and more visibility and has begun to be implemented into many engineering application areas, including that of Reliability, Maintainability, Safety and Mission Assurance (RMS&MA). As we have observed, the theoretical foundation of MBSE has been well established, but industry-wide adaptations of MBSE are still largely lacking across multidisciplinary engineering areas, including RMS&MA, as evidenced by the fact that there are very few MBSE and RMS&MA integrated analyses being conducted by major US defense and aerospace companies as part of their deliverable artifacts. One of the reasons for this lagging is that the inter-relationships and linkages between RMS&MA analyses and other product design and development disciplines including Systems Engineering requirement analyses (requirement decomposition, requirement and functional flow analysis), product definition data (drawings, specifications), and mission assurance data sets (verification and validation data, qualification, certification and acceptance test data) are not well modeled. As such, some key benefits from MBSE and RMS&MA integration are not fully recognized and realized, which leads to lack of motivation for implementing MBSE with RMS&MA analyses.This paper proposes an MBSE and FMEA Integrated approach using the Vitech GENESYS® tool as a way to overcome the aforementioned weakness. A brief introduction of GENESYS will be given. Comparisons of GENESYS and SysML as implemented by Cameo will be discussed. A pilot case using GENESYS to model FMEA will be presented that illustrates some unique benefits of GENESYS based FMEA.