IOP Model
Program Manager Force Projection’s Interoperability Program are a set of documents that profile standards to define the logical, physical, and electrical interfaces between major subsystems on robotic ground vehicles. In IOP, “Instantiations” specific to a program may be provided as part of the “Request for Proposal” process. The IOP Instantiation becomes an additional type of Interface Control Document that the vendor must adhere to. As part of risk mitigation, the IOP Instantiation can be viewed as a set of requirements to evaluate competing solutions against each other. As part of the acquisition process, a vendor utilizes an IOP Instantiation as a set of requirements that their product’s interfaces must fulfill in order to be interoperable with other products within the system under development.
IOP Meta Model
The IOP meta model enables the representation of IOP concepts including attributes, requirements, parameters, and instantiations which a Project Manager (PM) may use for acquisition and risk mitigation. The profile library contains two profiles: Source Capture and IOP. The Source Capture profile is how a user creates traceability back to a program’s source capabilities descriptions and requirements. The IOP profile contains the stereotypes for the core IOP constructs, which are attributes, requirements, and parameters. In addition, it contains candidate specializations for attributes and requirements. Through the use of these profiles, individual libraries of IOP content can be built.
IOP Libraries
To date the IOP has released 6 versions numbered “V0” through “V5.” V2 onward can be built in an SysML tool using the meta-models. The libraries contain IOP concepts such as IOP Attributes, IOP Requirements and IOP Parameters as well as their organization. A program or project can choose which version of the IOP they are developing to and then build a model for the instantiation to their program using the library, and a portion of the meta-models dedicated to building instantiations. Instantiations are created using specialized relationships defined in the IOP profiles that create linkages from system elements to the IOP concepts. An instantiation may be viewed as an additional type of Interface Control Document that the vendor(s) must comply with when designing and implementing their systems.
A set of templates or patterns are available that a user can start with in order to learn best practices for modeling IOP concepts. These include a set of use case diagrams, and all that is included in the separate packages distributed with the IOP Profiles. The intent is to link patterns, use-cases, and documentation together in order to further aid a user in the use of the IOP modeling. Linking use-cases give users the ability to see which portions of the profiles exist to satisfy their own use cases. Patterns can serve in two ways: 1) they may be copied into the user’s model and modified, or 2) as a learning tool.
PM FP has developed a Java-based tool for creating instantiations, which works in conjunction with the IOP Profiles. The IOP tool has been augmented with the ability to export IOP content into a format that the SysML modeling tool can consume. As a result, there is a capability to generate the IOP version-specific libraries along with the instantiation for a program or project. This greatly reduces the amount of work to produce IOP content within the modeling environment.
The tool aids the user in the organization and writing of the instantiations and when exported to the modeling environment produces all of the relationships linking the Attributes, Requirements, Parameters, and source capability information to the resources within the subject architecture.