TRAIL: SysML: Simple model of an air conditioner with a refrigerant cycle and StateMachine driven by Activities in MagicDraw/Cameo

This is not a intended as a complete Systems Modeling Language v1 (SysML^®) tutorial, it's just some diagram slides from a simplified model of an air conditioner (adapted from a presentation on the bare basics of Model-Based Systems Engineering with SysML for a client). You can, however, follow this trail from start to finish, it does describe a coherent modelling story and it includes lots of nice modelling tips and discussions of modelling options.

The model is sufficient to support a simple simulation of the refrigerant cycle for a typical air conditioner in Magic Model Analyst^® (Cameo Simulation Toolkit^®), and there's an accompanying narrated screencast video.

The system has a combination of signal flows and physical flows, but does not yet employ full modelling of physical interactions with flows for conserved quantities. It could, however, be upgraded to leverage the SysML Extension for Physical Interaction and Signal Flow Simulation (SysPhS), and this approach is shown briefly just for two flowing quantities.

For now it serves as a quite nice example of modelling of Ports with FlowProperties in Systems Modeling Language v1 (SysML^®), and of simulation of Activities and StateMachines. It also has some nice examples of how one can use the SysML ItemFlow in an Internal Block Diagram (IBD) to show transformation of flows, in this case refrigerant.

The audience members for the initial presentation were new to SysML, so there are some explanations about basic notations included in some of the diagram slides.