Interest In Systems Research Articles

Context‐Based Systems Engineering

AbstractThis paper proposes an innovative problem/system decomposition approach. Unlike the conventional method, where stakeholder requirements are transformed into system requirements for the system‐of‐interest (SOI), the new approach involves decomposing stakeholder requirements into specifications for modified context subsystems. These subsystems comprise elements from both the SOI and its surrounding context.The new approach offers two key strengths. Firstly, an enhanced contextual relationship. The approach naturally establishes a relationship between the SOI and its context across various abstraction levels. This contextual linkage fosters modularity and agility within the system. Secondly the new approach enables precise functionality definition. Unlike mere declarations, the new approach allows for explicit functionality definition at all levels. Consequently, we can formulate executable requirements, enabling system simulation across all system levels. Very early integration, verification, and validation become possible as a result.

Application of the System‐Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) technique to enabling systems in the rail industry

AbstractInvestigations into several recent railway safety incidents have concluded that failures of enabling systems contributed significantly to the root cause of those incidents, suggesting a tendency towards poor management of safety risk associated with subsystems outside the immediate System of Interest (SoI) boundary. This paper examines whether better application of systems thinking to the analysis of hazards, through use of the System‐Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) technique, could have enabled safety risk to be better identified and managed in the circumstances surrounding a serious derailment that occurred in Victoria, Australia in February 2020.

Traceability – A vision for now and tomorrow

AbstractTraceability has been addressed in the past from the perspective of relationships between the digital artifacts within the data and the information model of the system of interest (SoI) being developed. This paper enhances this view from a project management (PM), systems engineering (SE), and a configuration management (CM) perspective. The paper discusses what traceability is today and how it can help PM and SE practitioners meet future needs to realize the INCOSE Vision 2035 and satisfy all needs and requirements baselined for a SoI, including compliance with standards and regulations. Provenance and pedigree are two aspects discussed of how traceability enhances the management of digital artifacts from a CM point of view. This paper provides a vision of how traceability can aid PM and SE practitioners to develop quality products that deliver what is needed, within cost and schedule, with the needed quality.

Applying System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA)-based methodology supported by Systems Engineering models to a UK rail project

Systems safety in railways focuses on providing the necessary assurance that the railway system is operationally safe and meets all relevant regulatory requirements. Safety risks associated with changes in the UK railway are controlled through the Common Safety Method for Risk Evaluation and Assessment (CSM-RA). As part of the CSM-RA framework, various safety analysis methods such as Failure Modes and Effects Criticality Analysis (FMECA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Event Tree Analysis (ETA) and other traditional analysis methods conducted via expert brainstorming such as Hazard Identification (HAZID) workshops have been relied upon for many years in the UK rail industry; aiming to evaluate and mitigate all reasonably foreseeable hazards. This paper reports a comparison case study of the application of a novel System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA)-based methodology against the traditional approach for hazard analysis in UK rail projects. The proposed methodology uses Systems Engineering (SE) models in each of its steps. The application of the novel methodology demonstrates that it is suitable for hazard identification and analysis in complex rail systems. It shows that the approach goes beyond the capabilities of traditional methods, provides insights into the interaction among system components and captures hazards within the context of the whole. The SE models used in this study prove to be valuable not only for illustrating the System of Interest (SOI) visually, but also providing a high-level understanding of the system and a more detailed understanding of component interactions. They also improved the focus, in scope, effectiveness, and efficiency of the analysis.

FuSE Agility as a Foundation for Sound MBSE Lifecycle Management

ABSTRACTOver the past several years, numerous industries have increased their adoption of the systems modeling language (SysML®) and model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) as a core practice within their engineering lifecycles. However, the introduction of SysML and MBSE methodologies has not yet yielded many of the originally envisioned benefits. System models are becoming larger and more complex and many large MBSE projects continue to experience problems with model integration, repository performance, and model lifecycle management. The root cause is the failure to recognize the MBSE digital environment as a complex engineering information processing system that requires the same rigor and development processes as the system‐of‐interest (SoI) it is designing. This article describes how three future of systems engineering (FuSE) agility foundation concepts (system of innovation, effective stakeholder engagement, and continuous integration) directly address some of the problems seen in adoption, deployment, and sustainment of the MBSE digital environment as an SoI.

THE EFFECT OF ADOPTING RAPIDLY EMERGING TECHNOLOGY ITEMS DURING THE DEVELOPMENTAL PHASE ON SYSTEMS ENGINEERING DESIGN IN AVIATION INDUSTRY

Requests from stakeholders to include Rapidly Emerging Technology Items into the system under development during the design phase become essential to maintain competitiveness. This paper aims to analyze the effect of adopting the Rapidly Emerging Technology Items (RETIs) during the development process phase of the Systems Engineering approach. Subject matter experts were surveyed with various qualitative questions. Purposeful sampling was used in choosing participants who were "information-rich." Therefore, the individuals and sites selected should be knowledgeable people who have experience in engineering projects' technical and managerial aspects. Referring to the pattern of the data and the author's reflexivity, five themes were identified in this paper, including the problem validation, design professionality, the drivers of the Rapidly Emerging Technology Items (RETIs), the technology type, interaction between the design organization and the RETIs drivers, and the tool for evaluating the rapidly emerging technologies. The analysis of the themes revealed that, due to the adoption of RETIs, the design organization needs to re-define the requirements, re-verify and re-validate the System-Of-Interest (SOI), which leads to longer time in system design and increases the allocated budget. Finally, improvement interventions are required to ensure that RETIs are adopted efficiently throughout the development phase.

Integration of SysML and Virtual Reality Environment: A Ground Based Telescope System Example

In recent years, Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has continued to develop as a standard for designing, managing, and maintaining increasingly complex systems. Unlike the document centric approach, MBSE puts the model at the heart of system design. Among the various MBSE language development efforts, “Systems Modeling Language (SysML)”, is the most anticipated and broadly utilized in the research and in industrial practice. SysML originated from Unified Modeling Language (UML) and follows the Object-Oriented Systems Engineering Method (OOSEM). SysML diagrams help users create various systems engineering artifacts, including requirements, use cases, operational concepts, system architecture, system behaviors, and parametric analyses of a system model. In the early days of implementation, MBSE languages, including SysML, typically relied on static viewpoints and limited simulation support to depict and analyze a system model. Due the continuous improvement efforts and new implementation approaches by researchers and organizations, SysML has advanced vastly to encompass dynamic viewpoints, in-situ simulation and enable integration with external modeling and simulation (M&S) tools. Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a user interactive and immersive visualization technology and can depict reality in a virtual environment at different levels of fidelity. VR can play a crucial role in developing dynamic and interactive viewpoints to improve the MBSE approach. In this research paper, the authors developed and implemented a methodology for integrating SysML and VR, enabling tools to achieve three dimensional viewpoints, an immersive user experience and early design evaluations of the system of interest (SOI). The key components of the methodology being followed in this research paper are the SysML, a VR environment, extracted data and scripting languages. The authors initially developed a SysML for a ground-based telescope system following the four pillars of SysML: Structure, Requirements, Behavior and Parametrics. The SysML diagram components are exported from the model using the velocity template language and then fed into a virtual reality game engine. Then, the SysML diagrams are visualized in the VR environment to enable better comprehension and interaction with users and Digital Twin (DT) technologies. In addition, a VR simulation scenario of space objects is generated based on the input from the SysML, and the simulation result is sent back from the VR tool into the model with the aid of parametric diagram simulation. Hence, by utilizing the developed SysML-VR integration methodology, VR environment scenarios are successfully integrated with the SysML. Finally, the research paper mentions a few limitations of the current implementation and proposes future improvements.

Concept Verification and Validation Using Psychological Scales through an “Eating‐Together” System Enhancing Connectivity for Busy‐Generation Urbanites with Neighborhood Community in Japan

AbstractRecently, with the growing demand for qualitative values such as wellbeing, development and implementation of systems considering societal needs. This paper presents an approach of concept verification and validation for the proposed “Eating‐Together” system that aims to enhance connectivity among neighbors of busy urbanites in Japan. The study utilized three psychological scales, including the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), General Self‐Efficacy Scale (GSES), and Social Worth as Measures of Performance (MOP). In developing the concept of the System of Interest (SOI), four main aspects were identified as mission requirements. The prototype was built based on the final concept model, and nine tests were conducted with 15 hosts and 31 guests. The questionnaires were administrated three times: before, immediately after, and two weeks after the event. The results indicated that the prototype successfully met all of the mission requirements, providing an improved method to estimate the otherwise unmeasurable elements.

Storytime, Audience to Authors: Enhancing Stakeholder Engagement

AbstractThis paper is largely aimed at Public Agencies, such as Infrastructure and Transit authorities. The creation and development of projects at these agencies impacts multiple layers of stakeholders, who, in the collective experience of the authors, are often not involved in the project until the middle or end of the development phase or not until they have to use the system. These neglected end users and influencers of the system do not have a timely voice – they are effectively excluded.This paper advocates for the early engagement of all defined stakeholders; the obvious and the unconventional, both internal and external to the agency. This paper does not provide a detailed ConOps process but rather defines what a ConOps is, why it is necessary, and at what stage in the project should one be developed. The principal conversation herein focuses on how to determine who the audience is for the system of interest (SOI) and ways to engage them. The paper describes a holistic approach to the creation and development of a ConOps deliverable by engaging the audience, who become stakeholders and effectively, authors. This paper concludes with a case study encompassing the discussion.

A Semantic Model Framework for the Cyber‐Physical Production System in the Systems Engineering Perspective

ABSTRACTA cyber‐physical production system (CPPS) is a system of digital and physical components with networked connections. These components are deeply intertwined and operate in situation‐dependent ways across all production levels. The system behavior is complex due to its dependencies and the relationship between its parts and their environment. The diversified components and their relationship lead to challenges for the involved actors in system development, operation, and end of life phases. There is a need for a generic semantic model framework to provide a unified description of all aspects and properties of the CPPS. In this paper, an overview and expected outcome of semantic model framework is presented. As a first step, the core elements, and boundaries of the CPPS are proposed. Based on a fundamental concept of systems engineering, the core elements are defined as a System of Interest (SOI) and Enabling Systems (ES).

What to Expect From IEEE 7000: The First Standard for Building Ethical Systems

IEEE 7000™ is a long-awaited standard promising organizations the “ethical specs” <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> that seem to be overdue in engineering roadmaps. One hundred and fifty-four experts were, at some point, involved in IEEE 7000, 34 being Workgroup (WG) members. Seventy-seven experts balloted for its publication in 2021 (93% acceptance rate). In this article, I want to give a short overview of what to expect from IEEE 7000 and how it came about. The 79-page normative standard, involved hundreds of online discussions over five years, engaging self-selected individuals stemming from many cultures (Europe, Middle East, the United States, Australia, and Latin America) and a broad set of professional backgrounds (engineers, philosophers, theologists, consultants, etc.). There was one core question to be answered: How can tech organizations of whatever size and industry build more ethical systems? But what is “ethical?” When laymen hear the word “ethics,” they easily confound it with “morals.” This is not how the IEEE 7000 WG refers to it. Instead, IEEE 7000 guides developers in making their products and services compatible with the ethical values of the communities in which technical products and services are placed and used. The standard gives step-by-step guidance to organizations on how to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">care</i> for stakeholder values from the early conception of a system all through its development (and depending on its reading, during later deployment). Organizations that envision building technology for humanity (instead of only profit) get an answer to the Kantian question “How should I act”? I, the engineer, and I, the manager. How should the organization prepare for an IT project? How should it elicit and prioritize values? How can it ensure that prioritized values are ending up in the system-of-interest (SOI)? And how can the organizational and technical engineers transparently share their value mission and effort?

Formulas and Guidelines for Deriving Functional System Requirements from a Systems Engineering Model

AbstractWithin this paper, we discuss a specific approach to system‐level modeling using activities, with the goal of writing English‐language requirements for the System of Interest (SOI), and then using formulas which interact with the model to proceduralize the authorship process. This overall approach makes it possible for most technical participants in a program to do most of their development work in a collaborative modeling environment, spending most of their time dealing with technical issues rather than language issues, while implementing a rapid translation to English‐language functional requirements toward the end of the process which may eventually be automated.

Leveraging a System Model to Initiate Security Architecture Development for Product Lines

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a method for leveraging Model Based Systems Engineering to facilitate systems security architecture development, with product line engineering considerations. The sensitivity of systems security information constrains the development of the system security model. Creating a tailored subset of the system of interest (SOI) model can generate value as a system security decision driver, and serve as the cornerstone for system security model development. This establishes clear correlation points between the SOI model and system security model. Conducting this collaboration early in the SOI lifecycle enables engineers to implement security considerations in the system design, reducing the cost and schedule impact of delaying system security development. For product line systems, common features are quickly identified with their associated security considerations. Variants retain these common features, preventing rework.

MBSE Methodology Applied for a Technology Demonstrator in the Space Transportation Sector

AbstractOver the last 40 years, NASA has sponsored many technology development programs for composite cryogenic tanks (CCT) in order to improve space launchers’ performance. However, they have learned certain lessons in terms of risk mitigation, design failures, lack of technology maturation and time constraints during development phases that push to reinforce the systems engineering perspective given the number of new functions, components and subsystems involved in these CCTs performance.The present paper suggests a Model‐Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methodology to reduce the challenges that CCTs entail in a technology demonstrator program currently in a conceptual phase for the Ariane 6 upper stage. Topics such as a strong operational analysis; project instability; a Fully Integrated Operational System (FIOS) model combined with a Manufacturing, Assembly, Integration &amp; Test (MAIT) model; requirements traceability; and model navigability issues are studied throughout the modelling process. Results from this approach show and ease the way to obtain information in a complex and large model intended to simulate our System of Interest (SoI)/CCTs life cycle. Consequently, CCTs can face NASA's aforementioned lessons learned from an early phase of the project in order to prevent similar adverse situations.

A Functional Failure Analysis Method of Identifying and Mitigating Spurious System Emissions From a System of Interest in a System of Systems

Abstract Increasingly tight coupling and heavy connectedness in system of systems (SoS) present new problems for systems’ designers and engineers. While the failure of one system within a loosely coupled SoS may produce little collateral damage beyond a loss in SoS capability, a highly interconnected SoS can experience significant damage when one member system fails in an unanticipated way. It is therefore important to develop systems that are “good neighbors” with the other systems in an SoS by failing in ways that do not further degrade an SoS’s ability to complete its mission. This paper presents a method to (1) analyze a system of interest (SoI) for potentially harmful spurious system emissions (failure flows that exit the SoI’s system boundary and may cause failure initiating events in other systems within the SoS) and (2) choose mitigation strategies that provide the best return on investment for the SoS. The method is intended for use during the system architecture phase of the system design process when functional architectures are being developed, and analysis of alternatives and trade-off studies are being conducted2.

Systems Theoretic Process Analysis for Layers of System Safety

AbstractThe move toward autonomous vehicles (AV) and mobility services extends the scope of traditional vehicle systems to include a much broader system definition. Questions often arise on how to identify a practical level of system hierarchy for the analysis. System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) is a hazard analysis technique that can be used to handle emergent properties of large, organized systems. However, STPA lacks the degree of formalization required to implement it successfully in a fast‐paced industrial environment. This paper introduces a framework to apply top‐down STPA on complex systems at multiple levels of decomposition and abstraction. In particular, we leverage the hierarchy within the system of interest (SOI) in tandem with STPA and proactively analyze complex dynamic processes that could potentially lead to accidents. This leads to multi‐level hierarchical progression of STPA on SOIs, in addition to analyzing each system element at different abstraction levels. The outcome of the analysis is a set of requirements for safety, cybersecurity, performance and business needs. The paper also provides guidelines on using these derived requirements to steer the system design. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology by applying it to an AV ride‐sharing ecosystem.

Early evaluation of technical debt impact on maintainability

It is widely claimed that Technical Debt is related to quality problems being often produced by poor processes, lack of verification or basic incompetence. Several techniques have been proposed to detect Technical Debt in source code, as identification of modularity violations, code smells or grime buildups. These approaches have been used to empirically demonstrate the relation among Technical Debt indicators and quality harms. However, these works are mainly focused on programming level, when the system has already been implemented. There may also be sources of Technical Debt in non-code artifacts, e.g. requirements, and its identification may provide important information to move refactoring efforts to previous stages and reduce future Technical Debt interest. This paper presents an empirical study to evaluate whether modularity anomalies at requirements level are directly related to maintainability attributes affecting systems quality and increasing, thus, system's interest. The study relies on a framework that allows the identification of modularity anomalies and its quantification by using modularity metrics. Maintainability metrics are also used to assess dynamic maintainability properties. The results obtained by both sets of metrics are pairwise compared to check whether the more modularity anomalies the system presents, the less stable and more difficult to maintain it is.

Multi-objective multiagent credit assignment in reinforcement learning and NSGA-II

Multiagent systems have had a powerful impact on the real world. Many of the systems it studies (air traffic, satellite coordination, rover exploration) are inherently multi-objective, but are often treated as single-objective problems within the research. A key concept within multiagent systems is that of credit assignment: quantifying an individual agent's impact on the overall system performance. In this work,we extend the concept of credit assignment into multi-objective problems. We apply credit assignment through difference evaluations to two different policy selection paradigms to demonstrate their broad applicability. We first examine reinforcement learning, in which using difference evaluations improves performance by (i) increasing learning speed by up to 10$$\times $$×, (ii) producing solutions that dominate all solutions discovered by a traditional team-based credit assignment schema and (iii) losing only 0.61 % of dominated hypervolume in a scenario where 20 % of agents act in their own interests instead of the system's interests (compared to a 43 % loss when using a traditional global reward in the same scenario). We then derive multiple methods for incorporating difference evaluations into a state-of-the-art multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, NSGA-II. Median performance of the NSGA-II considering credit assignment dominates best-case performance of NSGA-II not considering credit assignment in a multiagent multi-objective problem. Our results strongly suggest that in a multiagent multi-objective problem, proper credit assignment is at least as important to performance as the choice of multi-objective algorithm.

The nekhoroshev theorem and long-term stabilities in the solar system

The Nekhoroshev theorem has been often indicated in the last decades as the reference theorem for explaining the dynamics of several systems which are stable in the long-term. The Solar System dynamics provides a wide range of possible and useful applications. In fact, despite the complicated models which are used to numerically integrate realistic Solar System dynamics as accurately as possible, when the integrated solutions are chaotic the reliability of the numerical integrations is limited, and a theoretical long-term stability analysis is required. After the first formulation of Nekhoroshev?s theorem in 1977, many theoretical improvements have been achieved. On the one hand, alternative proofs of the theorem itself led to consistent improvements of the stability estimates; on the other hand, the extensions which were necessary to apply the theorem to the systems of interest for Solar System Dynamics, in particular concerning the removal of degeneracies and the implementation of computer assisted proofs, have been developed. In this review paper we discuss some of the motivations and the results which have made Nekhoroshev?s theorem a reference stability result for many applications in the Solar System dynamics.

A Systems Engineering approach for the deployment of an atmospheric monitoring station

AbstractIn this paper the importance of a Systems Engineering (SE) approach is reiterated for developing and managing an atmospheric monitoring station. A newly established comprehensive atmospheric monitoring station, the Welgegund Atmospheric Monitoring Station (WAMS), was used as a case study ‐ system of interest (SOI). In agreement with commercial projects, the Customer Need has shown that the SOI life‐cycle may be time intensive with significant financial impacts. The Operational Concept was visualised in terms of physical requirements, operational methodology and final deliverables. Functional Analysis emphasised the design importance of the measurement station for continuous operation and to remain relevant throughout the system life‐cycle. Physical architectures and interfaces were scrutinised to maximise the efficiency of the SOI. Testing was vital and remains a continuous process. By continuing to implement the SE approach, the WAMS will satisfy the changing and unique stakeholder requirements throughout the system life‐cycle. The paper concludes that the SE framework provided made a positive contribution since the initial design and has adequately identified all the requirements in order for WAMS to be implemented on time, within budget and to the level of performance required.