The OMG standard Systems Modeling Language (SysML) has been on the market for about thirteen years. This standard is an extended subset of UML providing a graphical modeling language for designing complex systems by considering software as well as hardware parts. Over the period of thirteen years, many publications have covered various aspects of SysML in different research fields. The aim of this paper is to conduct a systematic mapping study about SysML to identify the different categories of papers, (i) to get an overview of existing research topics and groups, (ii) to identify whether there are any publication trends, and (iii) to uncover possible missing links. We followed the guidelines for conducting a systematic mapping study by Petersen et al. (Inf Softw Technol 64:1–18, 2015) to analyze SysML publications from 2005 to 2017. Our analysis revealed the following main findings: (i) there is a growing scientific interest in SysML in the last years particularly in the research field of Software Engineering, (ii) SysML is mostly used in the design or validation phase, rather than in the implementation phase, (iii) the most commonly used diagram types are the SysML-specific requirement diagram, parametric diagram, and block diagram, together with the activity diagram and state machine diagram known from UML, (iv) SysML is a specific UML profile mostly used in systems engineering; however, the language has to be customized to accommodate domain-specific aspects, (v) related to collaborations for SysML research over the world, there are more individual research groups than large international networks. This study provides a solid basis for classifying existing approaches for SysML. Researchers can use our results (i) for identifying open research issues, (ii) for a better understanding of the state of the art, and (iii) as a reference for finding specific approaches about SysML.

中文翻译：

---

SysML的十三年：系统的制图研究

OMG标准系统建模语言（SysML）已投放市场约十三年。该标准是UML的扩展子集，提供了一种图形建模语言，用于通过考虑软件和硬件部件来设计复杂的系统。在十三年的时间里，许多出版物涵盖了不同研究领域中SysML的各个方面。本文的目的是对SysML进行系统的制图研究，以识别不同类别的论文，（i）概述现有研究主题和研究组，（ii）识别是否存在任何出版趋势，以及（ iii）发现可能丢失的链接。我们遵循了Petersen等人进行系统制图研究的指南。（Inf Softw Technol 64：1–18，2015）分析了2005年至2017年的SysML出版物。我们的分析揭示了以下主要发现：（i）近年来，尤其是在软件工程研究领域，人们对SysML的科学兴趣日益增长；（ii）SysML主要用于设计或验证阶段，而不是实施阶段；（iii）常用的图类型是特定于SysML的需求图，参数图和框图，以及UML已知的活动图和状态机图。（iv）SysML是特定的UML概要文件，主要用于系统工程中；但是，必须对语言进行自定义以适应特定领域的需求，（v）与全球SysML研究合作相关，与大型国际网络相比，个人研究小组更多。这项研究为对SysML的现有方法进行分类提供了坚实的基础。