Importing Legacy Visio Diagrams into MBSE Models

Model Based System Engineering MBSE Legacy Data Block Diagrams SysML

Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) offers a range of benefits to Department of Defense (DoD) programs, from capturing the different aspects of complex systems into one configuration managed location, to reusability. However, because MBSE is still relatively new, there exists a large amount of legacy data that would benefit from being captured in an MBSE model. Capturing such legacy data would both enable users to better understand how and why design decisions were made on previous programs, and enable users to more easily reuse the data in current and future programs. However, the amount of time it takes to manually transcribe the information found in legacy documents, especially in static block diagrams, greatly hinders any effort to capture the legacy data in a model. In response to this problem, we developed a custom plug-in which automatically imports legacy block diagrams from Microsoft Visio to dynamic Internal Block Diagrams (IBDs) in NoMagic’s MagicDraw (Version 2021x). This plugin works by reading in the text, shapes, and connectors in a Visio diagram, translating the aforementioned objects into part properties, ports, and connectors, and positioning the newly created SysML constructs in a near identical way to the original Visio diagram. This poster presentation illustrates how Engineers can use this plugin to easily and quickly import legacy Visio block diagrams into an MBSE model in order to enable efficient reusability of legacy program data.