UML for systems engineering

The paper provides an introduction to the employment of Unified Modeling Language (UML) in systems engineering. The standard being developed for this purpose is the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) specification. This paper, while not dealing with SysML in depth, starts by observing several straightforward benefits of SysML and some of its (possibly, not so obvious) challenges. The primary objective of this paper is to provide pragmatic guidance to systems engineers, who want a jump start on SysML, by describing how to effectively use its base language (UML 2.0) in the context of systems engineering.