What's New in CORE 9

CORE provides individuals and teams a complete model-based systems engineering (MBSE) development solution. CORE’s foundation delivers a rich requirements management capability, multiple modeling notations and integrated discrete-event simulation, comprehensive architecture analysis, verification and validation, and robust, on-demand documentation.

CORE 9 delivers notable advancements in modeling power, model exploitation, model management, and team collaboration. Building upon our historical strengths of an integrated, model-driven architecture and the redefined user experience of version 8, CORE 9 unlocks new engineering capability making it easier to model new classes of problems. It provides on-the-fly diagnostics to improve the quality of your analysis. It provides new connectivity to tools and data across the enterprise. Put simply, CORE 9 delivers even greater capability to further enable project success.

CORE 9 highlights include:

• Architecting New Solutions with Cross-Project Relationships – As teams adopt model-based approaches, a commonly cited challenge is model management – for navigation, for collaboration, for access control, and for reuse. CORE 9 introduces the ability to create relationships between elements in different projects providing project teams and enterprise efforts great flexibility to partition their models as they see fit. Whether addressing process needs, reuse, contractual obligations, or any other concept, cross-project relationships enable teams to architect, manage, baseline, and reuse their models in a highly modular manner.
• Integrating State and Behavior – State models and behavioral models are often used to represent the same concept space but do so in completely different ways such that a common underlying model can’t drive both…until now. CORE 9 introduces the state transition diagram side-by-side with all of the behavioral representations you have leveraged for the past 20 years. It’s up to you whether you model a specific concept using state transition or behavioral approaches. CORE 9 simply expands your range of options to model and represent the way you choose.
• Increasing the Value of the Sequence Diagram – CORE 9 introduces notable changes that drastically improve the flexibility, utility, and communication value of the sequence diagram. Combining the consistency and power of a sequence diagram automatically computed from the underlying model with the flexibility to adjust and reposition (without accidentally violating the model constraints), CORE 9 delivers the best of both world to accurately communicate the interactions within your system.
• Connecting with IBM® Rational® DOORS® and More – Leveraging a wizard-driven customizable framework, quickly exchange data with the defacto standard in requirements management - IBM DOORS. Analyze existing requirements from DOORS or publish specifications from CORE into DOORS. Go further and leverage the same wizard-driven framework to exchange data with other engineering tools and desktop standards such as Microsoft Excel® and Microsoft Word®.
• Exposing Critical Design Parameters – Highlight design-dependent and design-independent parameters within your model while maintaining the ease and convenience of natural text. Parameters allow you to identify key values (weight, reliability, cost, or any other parameter you can think of), manage it separately as part of your object definition, and embed it directly in text fields so that as the value changes so does the text.
• Exploiting the Model with Automated Diagnostics – The greatest value of the model-based approach comes not from developing the model but from exploiting the model. To complement the embedded ability to directly simulate your model for dynamic verification, CORE 9 introduces a rich framework of embedded model diagnostics. With a library of over 70 completeness checks, countless consistency diagnostics, and a customizable framework for including your own rules, these model diagnostics go far beyond simple diagram-centric checks. Put simply, these diagnostics aid in the bookkeeping and validation of systems engineering, freeing you to focus your valuable time on the critical inspiration of systems engineering
• Staying Informed through the Notification Center – As project teams grow larger and models scale in size and complexity, it becomes more and more difficult to stay abreast of the latest changes. Certainly, we can rely on processes, baselining, and other techniques to help manage and control the design evolution. Basic alerts and the notification center in CORE 9 complement those processes helping to highlight the information that is most critical to you.
• Freezing the Design – Through the addition of element and attribute locks to complement CORE's underlying access control framework, CORE 9 delivers flexible control over short-term change control (for example, during project review cycles) and long-term project evolution. CORE 9 introduces the ability to lock individual elements, packages, folders, or the entire database. Once locked using the Manage submenu, these elements cannot be changed until they are unlocked by an administrator. In addition, where you have an attribute that should never change once set, the attribute definition can now be marked accordingly.  
• Refining Diagrams with Greater Control, Richness, and Usability – CORE 8 was largely defined by the transformation of the diagram framework. CORE 9 continues that evolution, albeit with smaller steps. To help project teams deliver a common graphical style, CORE 9 moves the diagram preferences from per-user settings to a new project preferences. To simplify access to the full power of the diagram framework, CORE 9 organizes and streamlines the diagram toolbars to improve usability while maintaining flexibility. To complement the richness introduced in CORE 8, CORE 9 includes a new information block that can be dragged on to any diagram. And for those that migrate their projects to the CORE 9 schema, you will find that links and interfaces are now decomposable which eliminates the “forked ancestry limitation” on block diagrams.
• Additional Enhancements – CORE 9 brings a long list of enhancements and refinements to the feature set, including the ability to export projects directly from the CORE Server (resulting in a 100x improvement in performance), expansion of the model assistant introduced in CORE 8, new richness in the COREsim model, a new project registry to enable storage of utility information for scripting and beyond, enhanced reports, and much more.

A complete description of all new features in CORE 9 is available in the What's New file on the Help > Documentation menu.