Hi Bruce!
My collogues have started to delve into Rhapsody for systems engineering purposes. They haven't read your books, followed your (my company's) guidelines and haven't done Harmony at all. They basically starting using it and creatively came up with their own custom methodology. Basically just started drawing stuff on an IBD. So I am trying to convince them on the pros and cons of adding additional model elements except for the once suggested by you.
To start with we have two objects: ElectricDrive and Transmission. There is a torque (unit should be NewtonMeter) flowing from the ElectricDrive to the Transmission. Using the Harmony notation the connected architecture would look like this:
My collogues instead uses the flow drawing tool:
Like this:
Thus creating a so called Item Flow in the browser:
They apparently like when the thing flowing is written directly above the "line" that connects the objects.
However I don't like it since this is not according to the modeling guidelines and simulation becomes impossible.
Therefore I thought that you might use what IBM refers to as Embedded Flows which seems to be the Rhapsody implementation of what is called Item Flows in SysML which allows you to view Item Flows on the connector:
where the Item Flows tab in the features dialogue of the Flow is then set to the FlowProperty on the IB:
This seems to be a good compromise to ensure Harmony consistency while still showing the name and type of the FlowProperty as an Item Flow on the connector.
Is this a good usage of the tool according to you? What would be the drawback, except for the redundant work it creates to manually add this Item Flows on all the diagrams...
Not a fan of item flows because they don't simulate and they're more notional than real. When there are flows, I greatly prefer the use of flow properties and put them in the proxy port interface block definitions. Those simulate and are therefore verifiable. Just adding a flow item that isn't related to the flow properties of the block is just "power point engineering", which isn't engineering at all. If the flow items are actually reflective of flow properties in the interface blocks and the collaborating blocks, then it's real, but adds no other value that depicting an icon on a relation.