Connecting Technical and Non-technical Views of System Architectures

When designing, adapting or extending a complex cyber physical system, it extremely difficult to guarantee that all parts cooperate correctly, especially when many parties are involved in the development process. We propose a new approach to identify and to solve problems in the early development phases, thus reducing costs in the system implementation, test and integration phases. This is achieved by making a global, holistic model of the system with different views. From the technical point of view, a system simulation model is constructed which can be used to validate whether the global system architecture satisfies the main requirements. To bridge the gap between technical specialists and non-technical stakeholders, this technical system view can be connected to a user-friendly animation tool. This allows the creation of an interactive prototype with different stakeholder views. The approach will be illustrated by a case study in the healthcare domain.