Exploring MOSA Implementation Through MBSE

Sometimes, technologists and practitioners give too little attention to the engineering practices and tooling that facilitate vendor-agnostic, interoperable engineering approaches. Such attention to detail is especially important when it comes to implementing the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA).

MOSA is an essential piece of the U.S. government’s efforts to optimize the acquisition and architecture of military systems. The approach helps organizations make better decisions in developing and procuring complex technologies, as they examine the ways that components are interchanged, upgraded, or replaced.

MOSA has been top of mind recently, with a Tri-Service Memorandum directing service acquisition executives to update MOSA guidance, and the Department of Defense publishing a memorandum urging adoption of Software Acquisition Pathway, stressing the need to streamline engineering activities to foster adaptability and ease of maintenance. These approaches are essential to enable deployment of new technologies quickly, including rapid capability insertion (RCI) for the warfighter.

MOSA is all about creating and managing complex systems. One cost-effective way to explore and document system characteristics is model-based systems engineering (MBSE), which has been mandated by the U.S. Department of Defense.

In MBSE, visual models represent system requirements, architecture, design, and behavior throughout a development lifecycle. Modeling enables early testing and validation, so practitioners can benefit from feedback and requirements or design updates. MBSE uses its own languages and tools to describe the system elements.

Using MBSE techniques, the DoD industrial base must focus on both the delivered product and the respective technical data package, and it must include the tools that facilitate third-party understanding and future updates, says Justin Pearson, Wind River’s senior director of architecture and business growth.

You can learn more about Pearson’s perspective in a session he will deliver at MBSE-CON, the Model-Based Systems Engineering Conference, to be held in Orlando, Florida, April 23–24, 2025. In “Advancing MBSE with the Wind River Portfolio,” he will dive into the benefits of languages used in MBSE, such as Lifecycle Modeling Language (LML), which can be used with Wind River solutions to support MOSA and to set the conditions for Software Acquisition Pathway–based acquisitions.

LML, implemented today within the SPEC innovations tool Innoslate, provides a way to manage rapid acquisition (through a browser via GovCloud environments), while maximizing accessibility to stakeholders across multiple locations and sites. Additionally, LML provides vendor-agnostic connective tissue down to the embedded MOSA implementations that Wind River provides, as well as our complementary tooling such as Intel Simics for digital twins and Wind River Studio Developer for heterogeneous DevSecOps.

MBSE-CON 2025 is the fourth annual conference focusing on the formalized methodology that that supports the requirements, design, analysis, verification, and validation of complex systems. MBSE-CON provides a great opportunity to immerse yourself in the process of design migration from Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft PowerPoint to digital engineering-centric, continuous deliveries. You’ll learn how to reduce the time it takes to understand a system’s moving parts, whether for initial acquisition or for the subsequent changes flowing through a Software Acquisition Pathway–based approach.

If you attend the conference, we invite you to join Justin Pearson for his presentation on “Advancing MBSE with the Wind River Portfolio,” currently scheduled for April 23 at 2 p.m. ET.