Patent ID: 8056046

Claim:
A method of determining one or more operational and/or logical aspects of a system, the method performed using one or more processors and memory, the method comprising: extending a plurality of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) tools that provide different modeling approaches for modeling the one or more operational and/or logical aspects, the extending performed using commonalities among the tools in model and view descriptions to obtain a plurality of modeling components of generic structure, the extending performed at least in part by providing mappings among meta-model and/or meta-data representations by the tools thereby providing model unification; using the modeling components of generic structure to obtain a system architecture model of a physical system; based on the system architecture model, using one or more of the modeling components of generic structure to obtain a plurality of related models targeted toward the one or more aspects; deploying the related models relative to the system architecture model, the deploying comprising implementing two or more of the different modeling approaches; and based on one or more results of the deploying, developing and/or adjusting the physical system.