Monterey Phoenix Behavior Modeling

Use Monterey Phoenix (MP) to reason about behaviors of your system. Using your knowledge. In your words.

Welcome

Monterey Phoenix (MP) is a Navy-developed language, approach, and tool for modeling and reasoning about system and process behaviors.

Why MP?

System and process designs are based on the set of scenarios we conceive of in advance. That set gets orders of magnitude larger with MP assistance. Lightweight formal methods are employed to generate far more use case scenario variants - more quickly and with less human error - than can be done manually. You will discover requirements you did not know you had until seeing examples of them not being met in the MP event traces.

Quick Links
Welcome - Box 1

What It Is

  • high-level, executable language for expressing complex behaviors using a simple event grammar

  • An approach for generating scope-complete1 sets of behavior scenarios to inform what behaviors are possible / impossible based on a given design

  • Supported by open-source automated tools that generate behavior scenarios as event traces along with global views across all event traces

  • 1Exhaustive up to a user-defined scope limit (lightweight formal method)

  • Easy to use for technical and non-technical professionals and students from diverse academic backgrounds

Welcome - Box 2 What it does

What It Does

  • Helps users reason about intended behaviors, realize their own assumptions / turn them into formal requirements, and expose and control potentially emergent system or process behaviors
  • Improves and extends behavior modeling capabilities of other tools with scope-complete scenario generation enabled by lightweight formal methods
  • Generates views of the system structure and architecture from well-defined behavior models
  • Characterizes events with attributes such as probability, timing (intervals or duration), likelihood, impact, cost, weight, etc.
  • Helps users verify and validate designs described in notations like UML and SysML and frameworks like the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF)
  • Annotates event traces automatically based on user-defined rules
  • Exhaustive model checking for system or process models having no event iteration
  • Facilitates modeling and simulation of systems of systems (SoS) across many application domains and enables exposure and control of certain types of associated emergent behaviors
Welcome - Box 3 Who

Who It Is For

  • Operational architects
  • System architects
  • Business process architects
  • Security analysts
  • Behavior scientists and analysts
  • Systems scientists
  • Educators who teach critical thinking
  • Students or professionals from any background seeking to improve critical thinking
  • Formal methods practitioners
  • MBSE practitioners
  • Test planners
  • Software developers
Welcome - Box 4 - what not for

What It Is Not

  • NOT a heavyweight formal method
  • NOT a substitute for tools that model concepts other than behavior (e.g., requirements traceability, wiring of physical blocks, etc.)
  • NOT a tool that requires specialized training or technical background
Welcome - Box 5 - what it doesn't do

What It Does Not Do

  • Physics-based modeling
  • Theorem proving
  • Exhaustive model checking for system or process models with iterating events at an unlimited scope
Welcome - Box 6 - Uses

Uses

Primary: Ask and answer questions concerning intended behaviors for a given event trace, or across all generated event traces

  • Assumptions about behavior logic
  • —Risk analysis / estimation
  • —Event timing
  • Resource utilization / real time systems modeling
  • —Cost analysis / estimation
  • Pattern analysis

Secondary: Generate documentation of system or process architecture to facilitate communication and understanding

  • Event trace views (Sequence diagrams)
  • Global views such as Activity diagrams, Component diagrams, State transition diagrams, Gantt Charts, Bar Charts, Histograms, Tables and Reports

 

Announcements

Announcements
 

14 Jan 2022

MP-Firebird has new user interface options at https://firebird.nps.edu including dark mode, grayscale color scheme, find and replace, word wrap, split screen, browser cache clearing, and a refreshed and expanded set of example models with cross references to the MP manual and student research.

27 Oct 2021

MP-Gryphon has new user interface features at https://nps.edu/mp/gryphon including faster observed run time, improved menu organization, improved activity diagram rendering, improved table alignment, model directory search, dark mode, find and replace, word wrap, split screen, and a refreshed and expanded set of example models with cross references to the MP manual and student research.

24 Feb 2021

Read about MP in the NPS news article entitled "Intuitive, NPS-Developed Behavior Analysis Tool Now Accessible to the Public."

15 Apr 2020

MP version 4 has been deployed at https://firebird.nps.edu.

MP version 3.5 remains available at https://3.firebird.nps.edu.

22 Aug 2019

MP version 4 has been deployed at https://4.firebird.nps.edu.

1 Nov 2018

The draft manual for MP version 4.0 has been made available on the Documentation page.

6 Sept 2018

MP version 3.5 has been deployed at https://firebird.nps.edu.

20 Jul 2018

MP version 3 has been deployed at https://firebird.nps.edu.

18 Jul 2018

Read about MP in the NPS news article entitled "NPS-Developed Software Detects System Design Errors Early."

Homepage disclaimer with SE image

Systems Engineering and NPS logos

Monterey Phoenix (MP) was developed at the U.S. Navy Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) by Dr. Mikhail Auguston in the Department of Computer Sciences. The engine behind MP is the result of decades of research and development. The web-based user interface MP-Firebird tool has been publicly available since 2015, and the locally installable MP-Gryphon tool was open sourced in 2020.

Material contained herein is made available for the purpose of peer review and discussion and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

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