Systems Engineering Advancement Research Articles

New Challenges and Advances in Systems Engineering at French Universities

New Challenges and Advances in Systems Engineering at French Universities

New Challenges and Advances in Systems Engineering at French Universities

ABSTRACTThis special issue of INSIGHT highlights the ninth edition of the French Systems Engineering Academia‐Industry meetings, organized by AFIS (Association Française d'Ingénierie Système), the French chapter of INCOSE, and supported by French universities as a regular series, usually every two years. Due to the COVID‐19 crisis, this edition occurred virtually in December 2020.These meetings, which are composed of workshops and plenary lectures, provides the opportunity for both academics and industrials to: debate on systems engineering practices, education, and competences development for professional situations, and develop and promote research in systems engineering.

An interdisciplinary strategy to advance systems engineering theory: The case of abstraction and elaboration

AbstractPrior advances in systems engineering (SE) theory were instrumental in defining the discipline and its tools, but are limited in perspective. The SE community needs new theoretical advances to address its existing and emerging sociotechnical challenges. This communication paper is a product of an NSF/SERC/INCOSE funded workshop on theory building in SE with a focus on the use of abstraction and elaboration. The overarching goals of the workshop were twofold. First, to illustrate the nuances and complexities of the theory building process with an emphasis on developing theory about the SE discipline rather than about a particular system of interest. The second goal was to stimulate a new wave of SE theory by providing a set of frames that could be used for formal theory articulation in follow‐up research. The workshop focused on abstraction and elaboration due to their richness and pervasiveness in SE and investigated the concept in two interrelated contexts: (a) the social coordination of design teams and (b) its strategic use during system design. For each research context, we offer a structured guideline for theorizing, and provide an understanding and framing of some of the generalized abstraction and elaboration uses in SE. Research frames articulated in this workshop could serve as the first step for future research on SE theory, which necessitates hypotheses generation, data collection, validation, and refinement.

AFIS Doctoral Symposium: New Challenges and Advances in Systems Engineering at French Universities

AFIS Doctoral Symposium: New Challenges and Advances in Systems Engineering at French Universities

Representing Advances in Systems Engineering by Using an Electronic Process Guide

Systems Engineering is a discipline that never stops growing. Systems Engineers are just like students or life-long learners who have to keep themselves up to date with new best propositions. With recent additions of novel concepts in systems engineering such as Social Networking concepts, Value-Based Requirements Prioritization, and Program Model, it is often challenging to translate these concepts into practices. An Electronic Process Guide (EPG) for Incremental Commitment Spiral Model (ICSM) aims to define clear systems engineering practices by providing necessary roles, tasks, step-by-step practical guidance to perform each task, and input, output, and supporting artifacts. This paper introduces the advances in systems engineering field and reports on how this EPG helps in expediting the learning process and supports the process authors in continuous maintenance and enhancement of the process guide.

1.5.0 DARPA and NSF Advances in Systems Engineering: META and Value‐Driven Design

AbstractINCOSE's objective to be the preeminent authority on systems engineering is being challenged by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) META program and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Value‐Driven Design (VDD) initiative.The goal of the DARPA META program is to dramatically shorten by a factor of five the design, integration, and verification timeline for defense systems. DARPA hypothesizes that a major cause of failed and challenged defense programs is the failure to update the systems engineering, integration and test process that has its roots in the defense programs of the 1960s. The progression from MIL‐STD‐499 to current EIA, IEEE and ISO systems engineering standards are evolutionary steps that are insufficient because of the complexity of current systems. DARPAs approach through META is to innovate model‐based composition to better manage complexity by proving correct‐by‐construction models using a proof of principle demonstration of a complex air or ground vehicle. META is the upfront portion of the Adaptive Vehicle Make (AVM) portfolio.The hypothesis of the NSF VDD Initiative is that the systems engineering approach to flow‐down and allocation of requirements results in systems that do not meet their system level requirements. The underlying cause is the nature of the human condition regarding risk taking and risk aversion. The VDD initiative is tapping into relevant fields in the social sciences and the use of objective functions in order to reinvigorate research into systems engineering and engineering design.

Making a case for systems engineering

In late 2007, the Systems Engineering Advancement (SEA) Project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) decided to design a multi-day Systems Engineering Workshop to train systems engineers in the practice of systems engineering. They were determined to avoid the trap of merely giving hours of lectures and presentations that would bore audiences and soon be forgotten. They decided to base the workshop on six detailed ease studies, each approximately 15 pages in length. The topics of the six ease studies were selected to cover a range of types of flight projects - orbiters, landers and rovers, planetary and earth missions, development and operations, spacecraft and instruments, recent past and current. By including this range of projects, they hoped to touch on a broad spectrum of systems engineering situations, issues, and challenges, and to use these to accomplish specific learning objectives. They developed a template for the case studies to ensure that specific areas were addressed in each case study, and to ensure that a ?big picture? view of the mission itself would be presented before getting into the ?meat? of the case, Then questions were designed to ensure that the workshop participants would wrestle with the systems engineering challenges presented, and would understand and absorb the systems engineering skills needed to address them. The workshop also included sessions of ?story-telling? by key Project Systems Engineers and short lecture sessions addressing key topics and concepts. This describes the approach and methodology for designing detailed case studies for use as learning tools for systems engineering training. It describes the planning and development process and the approach for actually utilizing them in a real workshop. It concludes with lessons learned and the results from the recent JPL Systems Engineering Workshop.

10.2.1 Improving the Practice of Systems Engineering at JPL

AbstractJPL has been investing in a focused effort to improve its practice of systems engineering. The Lab's senior management formed the Systems Engineering Advancement (SEA) Project in order to significantly advance the practice and organizational capabilities of systems engineering at JPL on flight projects and ground support tasks. This paper describes JPL's approach to improving the practice of systems engineering. It describes the general approach used and how they address the three key aspects of change: people, process and technology. It describes plans and progress in each of those three dimensions of change and concludes with some initial work in acquiring systems engineering metrics.

1 The Development of Engineering Processes for a Diverse Engineering Enterprise

AbstractThe development of a robust engineering process for a diverse engineering enterprise must not only accommodate a wide range of engineering activity but must also take into account other business functions as part of an overall business process. The development of a robust approach to the engineering aspects of the business process, based on existing practice but drawing upon advances in Systems Engineering, is described. This approach draws heavily on the interrelationships of process, milestones and baselines.