SmartCitySysML: A SysML Profile for Smart Cities Applications

Abstract

Current infrastructures in modern cities are highly dependent on complex software-intensive systems, which are composed of many elements, including software, sensors, actuators, and processes. Citizens and managers are also important stakeholders in these systems, as they provide data, provide and retrieve information and also manage the many systems that control the city infrastructures’. UML has been often considered for designing these types of systems, mostly with focus only on designing the software elements of the system. However, these infrastructures systems are composed of many more elements than software, including processes, constraints, sensors, networks, laws and further documents. SysML is a UML profile that has gained attention in past years, as SysML also models systems elements that are not software. In this paper, the main idea is to describe a SysML profile for modeling smart cities applications, which is useful as it specifies common elements of a city as native elements of system design. The profile, named SmartCitySysML, extended from SysML Requirements, Sequence and Block Definition diagrams in order to model system and software elements for smart cities. Design of a road traffic control system regarding a group of intersections is used as a case study. As a result, SmartCitySysML facilitates the use of common elements in smart city infrastructures and provides a visual representation to assess quality of diagrams from a practical point of view.