  The design of complex engineering systems is an often long and articulated
process that highly relies on engineers' expertise and professional judgment.
As such, the typical pitfalls of activities involving the human factor often
manifest themselves in terms of lack of completeness or exhaustiveness of the
analysis, inconsistencies across design choices or documentation, as well as an
implicit degree of subjectivity. An approach is proposed to assist systems
engineers in the automatic generation of systems diagrams from unstructured
natural language text. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are used to
extract entities and their relationships from textual resources (e.g.,
specifications, manuals, technical reports, maintenance reports) available
within an organisation, and convert them into Systems Modelling Language
(SysML) diagrams, with particular focus on structure and requirement diagrams.
The intention is to provide the users with a more standardised, comprehensive
and automated starting point onto which subsequently refine and adapt the
diagrams according to their needs. The proposed approach is flexible and
open-domain. It consists of six steps which leverage open-access tools, and it
leads to an automatic generation of SysML diagrams without intermediate
modelling requirement, but through the specification of a set of parameters by
the user. The applicability and benefits of the proposed approach are shown
through six case studies having different textual sources as inputs, and
benchmarked against manually defined diagram elements.
