Making Arcadia work for you - a look at framework tailoring in Thales UK | Thales | Capella Webinar
Channel: Eclipse Capella - Open Source MBSE Solution
Date: 20/02/2023

Presented by Alex Laing and Andrew Pemberton from Thales UK

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Architecture frameworks provide an approach to describing systems and the presentation of these elements and relationships to deliver the stakeholder needs. Essentially, frameworks provide templates for our engineering artefacts.

The design of a framework must accommodate a level of freedom in its usage; specific enough to answer the majority of stakeholder concerns, whilst generic enough to allow for differences between projects. This balancing act often results in framework design being more generic to allow for a wider audience. Having an untailored framework, which is more ‘open’, can lead to creating inconsistent viewpoints.

Arcadia is one such framework as implemented through the Capella tool. The framework provides 4 perspectives/levels for product definition:
- The Operational Analysis, where the user needs are considered. Note: no concept of the System at this level.
- The System Analysis, where we define the contribution and scope of the System as a ‘black box’, identifying external interfaces, and top-level system functions.
- The Logical Architecture, where we break the System down into logical ‘blocks’ and decompose the functionality.
- The Physical Architecture, in which we define a (candidate) physical architecture, further decompose the functions, and deploy this functionality to the physical sub-systems, hardware, software and/or firmware.

In this talk, we acknowledge the strengths of the Arcadia framework, and the benefits it brings, whilst considering the need to tailor the generic viewpoints. We will provide examples of how we have adopted the generic Arcadia framework and further specified some of the viewpoints to meet the needs of our stakeholders. We will discuss future work looking at how we can translate these specialisations across other areas of the model. Finally, we will provide some suggestions and advice on tailoring views to meet your own needs and ensuring stakeholder engagement with the model.

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Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction
2:19 - Main presentation
48:14 - Q&A: How do you work out requirements management and traceability?
49:24 - Q&A: Have you ever managed V&V needs in the definition of tailoring?
50:45 - Q&A: How is your experience to use Capella in bottom up design?
54:43 - Q&A: What were the main barriers of embedding Capella into the Thales organisation ?
57:55 - Q&A: How do you maintain the "big picture" view?
1:00:07 - Q&A: How have you captured and enforced modelling rules/conventions amongst members of the modelling team ?
1:00:10 - Q&A: What's your balance of trained Capella Modellers vs non-systems engineers?
1:03:23 - Q&A: In terms of Framework tailoring, are you actually changing anything in the framework data model?
1:04:42 - Q&A: Can you explain how you generated documentation to views?
1:06:52 - Q&A: How does Thales capture design rationale in Capella?
1:08:33 - Q&A: The Functional Chains: are these of the individual Functions?
1:11:19 - Q&A: Did you developed a color taxonomy code?
1:11:58 - Q&A: Haven't you used Operational Analysis to capture Stakeholder needs?
1:15:28 - Q&A: Unanswered questions

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