Architecting Diesel Engine Control System using A3 Architecture Overview

Abstract

AbstractThe Digital Governor System from Kongsberg Maritime (KM), has had an evolution period of 25 years. Technology has changed during this period and many new features have been incorporated. Consequently the product has increased in complexity over these years and the architecture was not explicit available. We decided to do reverse architecting to be able to decide what changes are needed to the architecture to support the next generation(s) of the product. This project was an opportunity to use the reverse architecting tool described in the System Engineering tool; “A3 Architecture Overviews”. Reverse architecting aimed to recover knowledge that remained in the expert's minds, in order to understand the system and its context. By doing so we were able to visually see where appropriate changes could be made. We learned that “A3 Architecting Overview” is more usable than traditional document, and easier to use as it only required a single sheet of paper.The “A3 architecture overview” is a single page overview of the system relating several System Modeling views: a functional model, some visual aids, a physical block diagram and a quantitative section. This was important because it supported communication and gave focus during discussions.