Assisted authoring of model-based systems engineering documents

In systems engineering practices, system design and analysis have historically been performed using a document-centric approach where stakeholders produce a number of documents that represent their views on a system under development. Given the ad-hoc, disparate, and informal nature of natural language documents, these views become quickly inconsistent. Rigor in engineering work is also lost in the transition from model-based engineering design and analysis to engineering documents. Once the documents are delivered, the engineering portion of the work is disconnected. In the Open Model Based Engineering Environment (OpenMBEE), Cross-References (aka transclusions) synthesize relevant engineering information where model elements are not simply hyperlinked, but de-referenced in place in a document, upgrading a document-based process with model-based engineering technology. Those Cross-References are nowadays partially created manually, putting a burden on the engineer who is authoring the document. This paper presents an approach which can assist the engineer by providing machine-generated suggestions for Cross-References using language processing, graph analysis, and clustering technologies on model data managed by the OpenMBEE infrastructure.