Decision support for early design choices

Context analysis methods for model-based design

Model-based design has proven to provide significant advantages when designing complex high-tech systems. However, applying these methods must not become a goal by itself. The methods must serve clearly specified goals and well-identified benefits within the product development process.

In some cases, especially when the required architectural changes are much larger than foreseen, the investment and effort in applying model-based design may become too large. This situation can be avoided by establishing an explicit context for modelling the application, early in the product development stage.

The context analysis (CA) method provides a schematic approach to position market drivers, critical realization aspects, core domain knowledge, design trade-offs, and modelling and analysis within one common high-level scheme. The CA scheme acts as a reasoning framework to focus the modelling towards those areas for which critical design choices are to be established.

Method description