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The development of engineered systems is a complex process, involving many activities and development artifacts. The challenges introduced by this complexity calls for a model-based design environment. The PROVE methodology is an artifact-centric, model-based development process design methodology. In this paper, we present the first, fully model-based design environment of the PROVE. Furthermore, our environment incorporates additional process design perspectives that are applied in real-time and in a completely consistent manner, based on a formally defined information model. We discuss the details of our environment's design as well as highlight its potential benefits.

The planning of system development efforts is crucial to the successful realization of projects. However, development planning typically lacks systematic, engineering discipline, and consequently risks project and business success. Model-based process design is a potential information systems approach to addressing the increasing complexity of such planning. We characterize the ontology of development process design, based on real-life observations and scientific publications. We then synthesize the required ontology with the desirable characteristics of models, and derive key requirements for model-based development process design. Next, these requirements are used to evaluate the adequacy of three prominent, standardized model-based process design approaches&mdash, BPMN, OPM and SPEM. The findings reveal that the surveyed models are a partial fit, and do not promote sound process design. Finally, by generalizing the categorical evaluation results, possible root causes for the identified inadequacies are proposed. A new model design, which should rely on the formulated requirements set, is called for, in pursuit of a wider adoption of model-based design paradigms and better information systems realization to support the development of complex systems.

As manmade systems become increasingly complex, a multitude of tasks needs to be performed in coordination throughout their development lifecycle. In this paper, we introduce a new framework – consisting of a method and a modeling notation – that can facilitate development planning within an organization and/or project, as well as improve the coordination of multiple development efforts in System of Systems development. Then, we describe a real life application of this framework to an organizational process and policy design situation of introducing intellectual property governance into a large enterprise which specializes in systems development.