Windchill Systems/Software Engineering Ideas

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders. As a solution architect in the medical device industry I support users of the MBSE tool PTC Modeler. 2. What product and version are you currently running? PTC Modeler 9.5 3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video. Creating SysML matrices and tables in the properties is complicated regarding the different fields in the properties. It would be nice if the matrices and tables would load faster when opened. Improving these points would make working with matrices and tables in PTC Modeler much easier. 4. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization? The improvement would lead to higher user acceptance and time savings. ... View more

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders. We are consulting multiple companies from all branches in the introduction and application of MBSE that want to use PTC Windchill Modeler. 2. What product and version are you currently running? We are running V9.5. 3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video. We want to be able to easily animate SysML Activity diagrams to verify and validate system behaviour on an abstract level. We evaluated SySim, but this only provides the capability to use State Machines and includes high coding effort (in VB or Action Language). 4. What is the use case for your organization? Being able to verify and validate system behaviour in early development. 5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization? This would reduce verification and validation efforts made in the later stages of product development und would create better, clearer requirements for the design phases. ... View more

Hello,   we are consulting multiple customers on application and introduction of PTC Windchill Modeler and want to use system models as basis for physical simulation models in Simulink. It is common practice to extend the standard SysML Stereotypes to company-specific Stereotypes (e.g. for creating a RFLT-hierarchy by deriving a "funcional block" or "logical block" from the standard SysML Block, see attached picture). The Simulink Synchronizer (in version 9.5) only recognizes standard SysML Blocks as elements for synchronization and will ignore blocks with such custom stereotypes.     This restriction will lead our customers to reconsider the decision to introduce the Windchill Modeler. Thank you for consideration. Johannes Krautkremer, :em engineering methods AG ... View more

Hello,   the Simulink Synchronizer dialog window is not resizeable. E.g. when displaying the Item Mappings Table (see image), it would be really helpful to not needing to scroll and resize the columns themselves to be able to see what is mapped, but to be able to resize the whole window to see everything at once.       Thank you for consideration. Johannes Krautkremer, :em engineering methods AG   ... View more

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders. As a solution architect in the medical device industry I support users of the MBSE tool PTC Modeler. 2. What product and version are you currently running? PTC Modeler 9.5 & PTC Modeler Web Interface 3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video. The usability of the PTC Modeler web interface could be increased in terms of zooming and panning. Here are some suggestions: - Zooming by turning the mouse wheel always zooms to the upper left corner of a diagram. It would be nice to zoom to the place where the mouse cursor is. - It would be great if you could adjust the visible part of the chart (after zooming in) by holding down and moving the left mouse button. - after selecting a part in a diagram, there is no visual indication that it is selected. This information only comes from the properties. It would be nice if this could be displayed with a frame around the object, for example. I would be happy if these points could be considered.   Also, I would like to say that the Web Interface is a great extension to Modeler for sharing content with "viewers". 4. What is the use case for your organization? Review SysML diagrams in the PTC Modeler Web Interface and navigating on those diagrams.  5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization? This would increase usability and thus increase acceptance among users. Thanks,  David ... View more

Actually, when a Variant of a Variation Point is set to Include in a decision set, then  Variation Point is automatically set to Included, and Undecided Variant of this Variation Point will be excluded at creation of a production model For example, in the following case:   Then the created production model will contain the following:   The proposal is to remain the Variation Point to Undecided status while Variant are still at Undecided:   Then, when creating the production model, only the Excluded Variant are removed (with all associated items), Items associated to Included Variant are moved in the production model , and all undecided Variants and Variant Points (with associated items) are also moved in the production model By the end, the content of the production model should be:     ... View more

Provide the ability to create legends on diagrams like in Enterprise Architect, see also http://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/11/modeling_basics/legends.html ... View more

  If an user drops a block on an internal block diagram a new part is generated. That`s the intended functionality. We noticed that a common fault is the unintended multiple creation of new parts by users.   An information for the user that a part with the same type is already in the model would be helpful to avoid multiple parts in the same IBD.       Message proposal:   There is already a part typed with this Block in the model. Do you want to use the existing part or create a new part?     "Show existing part"  "Create new Part"   ... View more

Parameterised requirements are very powerful way to reuse requirements between variants. Correct OSLC integration is not showing parameter substitution when using requirement through OSLC browser in Integrity Modeler. This function is very important in order to have a consistent connection between Integrity Modeler and Integrity Lifecycle Manager. ... View more

The requirement document in ILM has requirement nodes organised in a particular order under different heading but when browsing this document in Integrity Modeler's OSLC browser, all requirements are shown in alphabetical order (a flat list). There is a strong need for a configuration so that requirements are shown as it should be based on the document structure in ILM.   Typically in a requirement and test document there are 100s of requirements and it's not practical to use them through OSLC browser without a node structure for a production environment.   ... View more

In Integrity Modeler today it seems like a large challenge to verify the control or object flow of activity diagrams, it would be nice to easily simulate these diagrams in Integrity Modeler, much like in Cameo; the ease of simulation itself seems to need addressing since using a virtual client of IM doesn't allow connection with some of the simulation tools like Matlab or Visual Studio.  ... View more

Integrity Modeler allows creation of default display options and to modify options diagram by diagram. When we want to show the same diagram with more information for a stakeholder than for another, we need to recreate a new diagram from scratch and apply view options to this diagram. When, as it is our case, we have hundreds of diagrams, it is no more managable to double or triple the number of diagrams.   We suggest to allow creation of display options which can be applied on collections of diagrams. Depending on the user, diagrams may have more or less informations (callout notes, names, stereotypes,...) These options may also be used by Publisher to provide documents with the right point of view. ... View more

In the moment it’s possible to create private sandbox, which would contain only rights for the user, who created it. We would like to have possibility to create a real branch of the model with the same rights/groups as the model itself. ... View more

We would appreciate the ability to display ports, both full and proxy, on BDDs as displayed in the SysML Spec This would help detail high level flows before the IBDs.  ... View more

1. Add a 5th button for signal interactions. Currently only these 4 are available: (Operations, Returns, Events, IO-Flows.) 2. As for operations, offer only those signals which are offered by the respective (proxy) port or instance. tailored operation list port typed with signal interface   port typed with operation inteface ... View more

In Modeler 8.3, it's not possible to create N² Analysis matrices. I propose to enable this, by going further with the Custom Simple Matrix. Both rows and columns should be the same: they are the action nodes of a specific activity. The intersection is if 2 action nodes are interacting in the activity diagram of the activity i.e. if one action node sends/receives an object flow to/from the other action node.   Ideally, such a function would also include a way of sorting/grouping the activities easily based on the number of interactions, in order to ease the identification of high-interaction areas.   For reference, about the N² Analysis: https://www.burgehugheswalsh.co.uk/Uploaded/1/Documents/N2-Analysis-Tool-Draft.pdf             https://www.burgehugheswalsh.co.uk/Uploaded/1/Documents/N2-Analysis-Tool-Draft.pdf   ... View more

Problem: The selection of elements such as ports in internal block diagrams requires that the whole element including the names are within the selection frame. In cases with many names it is very difficult to get only the intended selection of ports. Suggestion: Change selection of ports so that only the port element but not the name must be within the selection frame. ... View more

Request for SysML standard features   We are missing some SysML features for state machines. See SysML Specification Chapter 13 Table 13.1.       Provide asynchronous communication within state machines   The signal features (receive and send) are required for the asynchronous communication with other entities in real time systems. Our code generators will map that on RTOS calls like snd_Msg or rcv_Msg.   Hide transition effect implementations   The action feature is required to avoid the explicit formulation and rendering of transition effects in the event action block. Given in the target language (e.g. ANSI-C). This action feature might be a feature to hide that implementation.   OR   Optionally a feature for the selection of operations or activities in the event action block would be fine as well. The name of the selected action or operation will then replace the raw implementation code of the effect.     Terminator pseudo state   The terminator pseudo state is missing as well. The terminator is helpful to complete a state machine at various states. Would be great to see this feature within PTC Modeler.   ... View more

The model element merge feature is very useful when two model elements are realised to represent one and the same thing, but each has its own set of associations and diagram representations. However, I have found that the merge is at the model element level and does not take account of duplicate associations and merge (or at least offer to merge) them. It simply adds all of the associations to the resultant model element. Moreover, when each model element (e.g. of type class) has generalisations to (or specialisations from) a common model element the merge fails with an error message that there are duplicate generalisations (or specialisations). The workaround is to remove the duplicate generalisation(s) from one of the candidate model elements, but in doing so the diagrammatic representation of these generalisations is also removed. This creates a manual task of finding all the impacted diagrams and then fixing them afterwards. A similar problem is created by the merging of all of the associations from both model elements onto the resultant model element. This creates model ambiguity and confusion, and requires a manual intervention to remove the duplicate associations and fix all of the affect diagrams.   Thus, please consider the model element merge feature to account for duplicate associations (inc. generalisations) and merge them, whilst persevering there graphical representations. There is a clearly some question about what should constitute a duplicate association, for which either a sensible level of detail in specification of each association can be considered, or an interactive merge assistant devised to walk the user through the choices. ... View more