4.4.4 Adapting UML for an Object Oriented Systems Engineering Method (OOSEM)

Abstract

Object‐oriented (OO) techniques have been used predominately by software engineers. Why would systems engineers want to add OO techniques to their existing practices? How should such techniques be adapted to be useful to systems engineers? This paper will show how an Object‐Oriented Systems Engineering Method (OOSEM) addresses these questions and how the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) at the systems engineering (SE) level can facilitate capture of system requirements and design information and ease communication between systems and software engineers. The techniques overviewed in this paper have been applied to information systems and have allowed engineers to model system needs, requirements, architectural design, and their allocation to hardware, software, databases, and manual procedures. The authors believe that OOSEM is applicable to engineering of other types of systems as well.