The development of a concept for a system is a key step toward creating the system's architecture. Most previous concept development approaches focus on the procedures for the conceptual design activity—the sequence of activities and tasks. Our work is motivated by the desire to elaborate in details the notional content of a system concept and to provide the means of encoding and analyzing it in a digital environment. The objective of this work is to develop a system concept representation framework that can systematically represent the concept's constituents, their definitions, and interconnections. In order to demonstrate the utility of this framework, we have conducted three studies: mapped eight selected US patents, nine selected urban architectural patterns, and three selected software patterns to the framework. Patents, urban architectural patterns, and software patterns each contain a rich body of knowledge about the system they describe, and therefore they must logically contain a description of the concepts underlying them. We show that the main features of proposed framework can be found in patents, urban architectural patterns, and software patterns. The major utility of the framework is that it provides the means to encode existing system concepts and to inform the conceptual design of new systems, contributing to the INCOSE Model‐Based Conceptual Design initiative.

中文翻译：

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系统概念表示框架及其对专利，城市建筑模式和软件模式的测试

系统概念的开发是朝着创建系统架构的关键一步。以前的大多数概念开发方法都将重点放在概念设计活动的过程上，即活动和任务的顺序。我们的工作是出于渴望详细阐述系统概念的概念内容并提供在数字环境中对其进行编码和分析的手段的渴望。这项工作的目的是开发一个系统概念表示框架可以系统地表示概念的组成部分，其定义和相互联系。为了演示此框架的实用性，我们进行了三项研究：将八项选定的美国专利，九项选定的城市建筑模式以及三种选定的软件模式映射到该框架。专利，城市建筑模式和软件模式各自包含有关其描述的系统的丰富知识，因此，它们在逻辑上必须包含对其基础概念的描述。我们表明，提出的框架的主要特征可以在专利，城市建筑模式和软件模式中找到。该框架的主要用途是提供编码现有系统概念并为新系统的概念设计提供信息的方法，