Papers for

systems engineering teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Modular system improves requirement quality checks using expert knowledge

MARQ: A Modular, LLM-Agnostic Requirement Quality Assessor Infused with Systems Engineering Knowledge

Abstract: Requirements engineering (RE) is foundational to systems engineering (SE), as requirement defects can propagate downstream and adversely affect development outcomes. Although large language models (LLMs) are promising for requirement quality assessment, prior work shows that off-the-shelf models miss a large share of expert-identified defects, perform unevenly across quality criteria, and vary across executions. This study investigates whether infusing expert-derived SE knowledge can improve LLM-based requirement quality evaluation beyond off-the-shelf capability. We present MARQ, a modular, LLM-agnostic prototype that supplements LLMs with a criterion-specific knowledge stack operationalizing INCOSE requirement quality criteria and evaluated against off-the-shelf baselines on an expert-labeled NASA requirement set using Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and the open-weight Gemma 3 12B, with 100 executions per model. MARQ achieves median F1 scores of 0.80 for Claude Opus 5, 0.62 for GPT-5.6 Sol, and 0.53 for Gemma 3 12B, compared with off-the-shelf baselines of 0.55, 0.52, and 0.18, respectively. However, the nature of these gains is model-dependent. Claude Opus 5 improves defect detection and false-alarm control; GPT-5.6 Sol gains detection and better execution-level consistency at the cost of more false alarms; and Gemma 3 12B reaches the performance of off-the-shelf proprietary models, although it remains highly variable. Criterion-level analysis shows gains concentrated in Correctness and Conformance, trade-offs between misses and false alarms within individual criteria, and model-dependent responses across several criteria. These findings position SE knowledge infusion as a promising model-agnostic pathway for strengthening trustworthy LLM-based RE support while underscoring the need for criterion-specific interventions and human-in-the-loop review.

Mon 26 OctArtificial IntelligenceSoftware Engineering
The gist
Requirements guide engineers on what to build, but if they have mistakes, problems can spread during development. The authors show that large language models (LLMs) alone often miss many of these errors or are inconsistent. They created MARQ, a system that enhances any LLM by adding expert engineering knowledge focused on requirement quality. MARQ improves how well these models detect errors in requirements, though the exact improvements depend on the LLM used. This suggests combining expert knowledge with AI can make requirement checks more reliable, but human review remains important.
Open → 2610.36234v1

Dataset and benchmark measure model consistency across multiple system diagrams

A Validated Dataset and Benchmark for Coherent Multi-Diagram SysML Models

Abstract: Systems engineers use several diagrams to describe the structure and behavior of systems. Engineers create these diagrams together to make sure that they use the same elements and remain consistent with one another. Large language models can generate diagrams as text or code, which makes it possible to create system diagrams automatically. However, their ability to generate coherent sets of diagrams is not well understood, and existing datasets and benchmarks do not directly measure this ability at scale. We introduce SEMAADB (Systems Engineering Modeling Assistant with AI Dataset and Benchmark), a dataset of 3,000 engineering contexts and 15,000 diagrams. Each context contains five connected SysML views: Requirement, Block Definition, Activity, State Machine, and Sequence. Here, a view is a diagram that presents one aspect of a system. We checked the diagram sets for consistency and valid rendering. A set of 100 contexts is also human-verified and forms the benchmark test set. We evaluate three language models on two tasks. In diagram repair, the strongest model repairs 64.3% of semantic errors . In cross-diagram update the best propagation F1 is 80.7% when a model applies one change across related diagrams. The results show that syntax repair is nearly solved, but semantic repair and consistency across diagrams are still challenging tasks for models. SEMAADB therefore provides both a large diagram resource and a set of benchmarks for measuring coherent multi-diagram SysML generation.

Mon 5 OctSoftware EngineeringArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Systems engineers create multiple diagrams to describe parts and behaviors of a system, making sure they all fit together consistently. The authors provide a large dataset and benchmark called SEMAADB that includes many connected SysML diagrams checked for correctness. They tested large language models on fixing errors and keeping diagrams consistent, finding that simple syntax errors are easier to fix than deeper meaning and consistency problems. This work helps evaluate and improve AI tools that generate sets of system diagrams together.
Open → 2610.07356v1

SysML model integration faces varied challenges with AI support valued

Cross-Organizational SysML Model Integration: A Survey of Challenges and AI-Supported Tasks

Abstract: Cross-organizational collaboration is widely regarded as a key promise of SysML-based Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), yet practitioners still face persistent challenges when exchanging and integrating system models. In parallel, Large Language Models (LLMs) raise expectations for AI-assisted model understanding and integration, while reliability and required human oversight continue to pose challenges. This paper reports the results of an online questionnaire survey with 29 MBSE stakeholders involved in cross-organizational collaboration. Respondents rated eight predefined integration challenge categories and six AI-supported task types on five-point Likert scales. The results indicate that stakeholders perceive model integration as a multi-dimensional alignment problem across semantics, behavior, traceability, and exchange interoperability. These perceptions vary by organizational role and frequency of integration involvement. AI is rated highly useful for analysis tasks such as semantic structure analysis and inconsistency detection, and respondents predominantly prefer human-in-the-loop use with mandatory verification. These findings motivate AI support that enhances, rather than replaces, engineering responsibility in SysML-based integration.

Tue 29 SeptSoftware EngineeringArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Combining system models from different organizations is hard because they have to match in meaning, behavior, and way of sharing data. The authors surveyed people who work on this and found that the challenges depend on their roles and how often they do integration. People think AI can help spot problems in models and understand their structure, but they want to keep humans checking the AI’s work. This suggests AI tools should assist engineers without taking over their responsibilities.
Open → 2609.37000v1