Utilizing System Models for Multicriteria Decision-Making—A Systematic Literature Review on the Current State of the Art

The rising system complexity of modern products requires new approaches within model-based systems engineering to manage the upcoming challenges. System development is characterized by a wide variety of decisions to be made. These situations have to be modeled within a holistic system model to ensure traceability. Motivated by lack of a comprehensive overview of approaches, this article presents the results of a systematic literature study focusing on utilizing system models in decision-making. By that, the existing gap between theoretical foundations and implementation in practical use is intended to be closed through providing practitioners insights to relevant approaches. Apart from that, researchers are enabled to derive new research directions from the corpus of literature. Relevant reports use different diagrams to model a decision situation or its processes and reuse those diagrams as well as their contents to feed methods from multicriteria decision-making. By that, new objectives are added to those diagrams, namely to enable extensive decision-making, which is understood as their utilization. Thus, this article provides an overview of applied decision-making approaches, languages used to model the decision context, and the use of external tools, where the decision-making algorithms are executed. The findings show that the majority of existing approaches only cover certain aspects of the decision-making situation in the system model and especially the formalization of the decision-making process is hardly considered. Besides that, future research fields including the analysis of potentials coming along with the introduction of systems modeling language v2 and especially its API are identified.