Satellite projects, for instance, demand lots of resources, from human to financial, as well accounting for the impact they play on society. This requires good planning in order to minimize errors and not jeopardize the whole mission. Therefore satellite conceptual design plays a key role in the space project lifecycle as it caters for specification, analysis, design and verification of systems without actually having a single satellite built. Conceptual design maps client needs to product use functions and is where functional architecture (and sometimes the physical architecture) is decided upon.
SysML is a broad and richly expressive graphical modeling language, enabling us to visualize and communicate the essential aspects of a system’s design: structure, behavior, requirements, and parametric (mathematical models). By employing SysML as a satellite architecture description language, this enables information reuse between different satellite projects as well as it facilitates knowledge integration and management over systems engineering activities.
VisualSim Architect is another electronic system-level software for modeling and simulation of electronic systems.
For a satellite communication systems, if we create and execute models on both the platforms, i:e using SysML and VisualSim, here we get many differences within the two.
To start with, SysML is a modelling language and not a modelling method. VisualSim provides information like the delays for each sub-system within the tasks, about the sub-system activity, orbit/ sun and battery power, task latencies etc. which are absent in SysML. VisualSim can be used for architectural analysis of algorithms, components, software instructions and hardware/ software partitioning. Block Diagram Editor in VisualSim is the primary graphical user interface and is supported with customizable library blocks of hardware, software and communication resources. VisualSim can widely be used for the Performance Modeling, Architecture Exploration and early power analysis. VisualSim simulation models of the proposed systems can be developed at various levels of hierarchy. Similarly, other differences can also be verified by performing the experiment yourself in VisualSim architect by clicking here.