Exploring System Space with Graph Theory

As today's Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) become more and more complex they provide both incredible opportunity and risk. Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) provides organizations a timely opportunity to address the complexities of Cyber Physical Systems. MBSE tools, languages and methods are having a very positive impact but are still in a formative stage and continue to evolve. Moreover, the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) has proven to be a significant enabler to advance MBSE methods given its flexibility and expressiveness. Unfortunately the number of people who know SysML well is relatively small. To bring the full power of MBSE to the larger community, system models can be rendered in intuitive forms to support broad understanding of system models. More specifically, Graph Theory has proven to be very effective in the design, analysis, management, and integration of complex systems. Use of Graph Theory and dynamic visualization can help teams gain insights, build intuition and ultimately help speed the innovation process.