Efficient systems analysis by combining SysML and coevolution

The engineering of a complex and large scale system with hundreds of competing requirements is a time consuming and costly process. In recent years, Model Based Systems Engineering has been adopted as a means of moving from a document-centric approach to a model based approach where reusable models can be used to analyse the proposed system. The application of multi-objective optimisation algorithms to generate a set of designs that represent the trade-off between competing system requirements would be highly desirable. In this paper, the authors apply different optimisation strategies, inspired by coevolution, to efficiently generate a set of solutions by identifying and exploiting the structure within the design. The preliminary results show that using the structure inherent in a SysML design has significant benefits in terms of the number of evaluations needed to generate the solutions.