The SE Tool Interoperability Plug-Fest

This is the home of the Systems Engineering Tool Interoperability Plug-Fest, an activity co-hosted by NIST and DoD's Systems and Software Engineering office.

The Plug-Fest provides an environment for SE tool developers to assess the interoperability of their implementations. Interoperability among SE tools is essential to the development of complex systems and system-of-systems (SoS) analysis. Such work often involves the collaboration of many disparate organizations. This work environment usually does not permit organizations to standardize on a single SE tool, and often not even on the same standard (e.g., SysML(tm)). The Plug-Fest will provide an environment for evaluating the interoperability of tools within the context of a single exchange standard, and across standards.

Scope

Since the purpose of the plug-fest is to foster tool interoperability, the primary focus is the exchange of SE data among tools that implement standardized SE data interfaces. Initially, interfaces supported within the scope of the plug-fest will include selected model interchange aspects of the following specifications:

SysML XMI
AP233 (Part 28)
CADM (DoD Core Architecture Data Model) XML, version 1.02

The Plug-Fest is designed as a series of "challenge problems" or "exercises" that are intended to allow participants to assess the interoperability of their tools. For more detailed information about the procedure, see the page "What we do". For a look at the exercises, see the page "Exercises".

References

Slides from the 2006-09-27 OMG SE DSIG meeting (Anaheim): .pdf .ppt .odp

Slides introducing this work, presented 2006-06-26 at the OMG ManTIS / SE DSIG joint meeting (Boston): .pdf .ppt

A more detailied discussion of plug-fest scope in relation to each of these technologies can be found here.

The design of the Plug-Fest is inspired by the CAx Implementor Forum.

Definitions

Conformance testing assesses whether tool characteristics' violate normative statements of the specification.
Interoperability testing assesses the ability of tools to share information among each other, and thus the ability of parties possessing differing tools to work jointly toward a goal.

Send questions or comments to se-interop@nist.gov.
Date Created: April 24, 2006
Last Modified: August 19, 2008