Systems Engineering Tools Research Articles

Experience from introducing Unified Modeling Language/Systems Modeling Language at Saab Aerosystems

AbstractA Unified Modeling Language/Systems Modeling Language (UML/SysML) subset was the modeling notation selected for an aerospace systems engineering project at Saab Aerosystems. In this paper, the rationale for selecting UML/SysML is given, along with a description of the situation at the project planning stage regarding business conditions, method and tools support. The usage of use case, sequence, and activity diagrams are described as well as definition of functional chains with SysML. Furthermore, the connections to system implementation activities including code generation and simulation are discussed. The advantages and disadvantages of using UML/SysML from experience in an industrial context are reported. It is also described how UML/SysML is related to industrial research projects in the Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods and tools area. Introducing UML/SysML with a methodology and a supporting toolset in an operative organization require a clear strategy, including planning, just‐in‐time training, and mentor support. Finally, industrial needs for further development of SysML are discussed. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Stakeholders Management in Public Sector Organisations — A Case Study of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL)

In recent time, details regarding various theoretical aspects of the Stakeholders approach to business have been developed. However, there is a lack of availability of a framework for the purpose of integrating stakeholders into the managerial mindset and decision-making process of the corporations. This has been further verified by the authors with the help of empirical data gathered through a survey, supported by responses from 700 managers across India. This paper attempts the development of a framework for Corporate Stakeholders Management by identifying the stakeholders of the corporation, enumerating their needs and translating them into objectives of the organisation. Further, the relative priority of these objectives for the purpose of organisational decision making is also attempted. This has been achieved through the use of Social Systems engineering tools. Utilising the case study approach, based on secondary data only, the applicability of the above framework has been illustrated. The casestudy of Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. (BHEL) — one of the finest Navratnas in the Indian public sector, has been used for this purpose.

4.3.3 Enabling Collaborative Decision Making: A Process for Integrating Novel Systems Engineering Tools and Methods for Renewable Energy Portfolio Analysis

Increasingly complex problems drive systems engineers to develop novel decision making processes. The breadth of complex problems demands the interaction of various groups, each focusing on specific areas but all addressing a higher level common cause. The process brought forth in this paper integrates a series of methods, some widely accepted and others which are novel in nature. Quality Function Deployment is used to capture customer desires and focus engineering level requirements. Multi-Attribute Decision Making is used to identify system configurations when multiple and competing objectives exist, which is a situation where traditional optimization struggles. The process of surrogate modeling is introduced to rapidly access elements of modeling and simulation, a necessary step to analyze system options. The very integration of these methods enables collaborative decision making. A proof of concept is presented where each of these methods is applied to aid in the portfolio analysis of renewable energy system options for a remote off-grid site.

9.1.1 Does Systems Engineering in Space Projects Pay?

AbstractThis paper attempts to answer the question whether it “pays” to apply Systems Engineering methods, tools and techniques within a space project. To this purpose a possible correlation has been investigated between the Systems Engineering effort applied within a number of space projects and the project result in terms of technical quality, cost and schedule.Use has been made of historical data derived from the results of Systems Engineering audits of projects, some recent audits performed along the same lines and assessments of project results in terms of technical quality, cost and schedule by the systems engineers involved in the projects. Basis for the audits is a checklist addressing 93 different aspects of Systems Engineering in the field of requirements, concept design, design & development, verification and technical management. In total nine data sets related to six projects in the industrial and the academic world were used.Although the data obtained are rather “noisy” there appears to be a clear positive correlation between the SE effort applied and the project result. It appears also that the positive effects mainly show up in the cost and schedule results of the project, the technical quality of the project result being generally of a rather satisfactory level.Examining the results in detail the Systems Engineering effort in the field of requirements, design & development and technical management has the strongest correlation with the project result. The effort in the field of (concept) design and verification shows a less strong correlation.The data have been “refined” by deleting the projects that were most strongly influencing the correlation in a positive sense. The overall results remained, however, the same.An overview is given of those aspects generally receiving little attention in the Systems Engineering effort. Further analysis of these results will be the subject of a follow‐on study.

3.4.2 Research on a Framework for Selecting and Applying Systems Engineering Tools for Australian Small and Medium Enterprises – II

AbstractMany of the subsystems developed by the Australian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are integrated into military systems developed by larger companies. If the SMEs cannot win and sustain defence contracts to develop the subsystems because of their lack of systems capability, then the ability of the Australian Defence to develop and deploy needed systems will be adversely affected. By systems capability it is meant effectual use of sound systems engineering (SE) processes and effective use of SE tools. Unlike most large organisations, many of the Australian SMEs engaging in defence work have not widely employed SE processes and tools in their endeavour. In addition, the SE software tools currently used by the Australian SMEs do not appear to have effectively aided the SMEs in their work. This paper describes a methodology employed in the development of a framework for aiding Australian SMEs in defence work in effectively acquiring and applying SE processes and tools and thereby helping to improve their systems capability. Specifically, the methodology involves a collection and analysis of information, using qualitative grounded theory as the fundamental analysis technique, and NVivo software as the analysis tool. The paper also discusses some preliminary results of the research and future work.

Using Architecture Modeling to Assess the Societal Benefits of the Global Earth Observation System-of-Systems

An enterprise architecture for the Earth science activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was developed to assist in assessing the capacity of scientific instruments in meeting the needs of society. It can also help them develop the right investment strategies and help scientists and engineers in their planning for system development, especially for complex space-based environmental sensors. This architecture model can be easily extended to the Global Earth Observation System-of-System (GEOSS). In fact, it was constructed with GEOSS in mind to ensure that NASA's observation systems can be readily mapped into the GEOSS structure. The architecture contains about 3000 elements that are involved in Earth science research: observation sources, sensors, environmental parameters, data products, mission products, observations, science models, predictions, and decision-support tools. The science models use observations from the space-based instruments to generate predictions about various aspects of the environment. These predictions are used by decision-makers around the world to help minimize property damage and loss of human life due to adverse conditions such as severe weather storms. The architecture is developed using both traditional and nontraditional systems engineering (SE) tools and techniques. This paper describes additional methods needed for the SE toolbox.

11.4.2 Applying SE Methods Achieves Project Success to Evaluate Hammer and Fixed Cutter Grinders Using Multiple Varieties and Moistures of Biomass Feedstock for Ethanol Production

AbstractApplying basic systems engineering (SE) tools to the mission analysis phases of a 2.5‐million dollar biomass pre‐processing project for the U.S. Department of Energy directly assisted the project principal investigator understand the complexity and identify the gaps of a moving‐target project and capture the undefined technical/functional requirements and deliverables from the project team and industrial partners. A creative application of various SE tools by non‐aerospace systems engineers developed an innovative “big picture” product that combined aspects of mission analysis with a project functional flow block diagram, providing immediate understanding of the depth and breath of the biomass preprocessing effort for all team members, customers, and industrial partners. The “big picture” diagram became the blue print to write the project test plan, and provided direction to bring the project back on track and achieve project success.

10.2.2 Research on a Framework for Systems Engineering Tools for Australian Small and Medium Enterprises

AbstractTo be self‐reliant and competitive in winning and maintaining defence contracts, the Australian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) need to improve their systems capability. By systems capability it is meant effectual use of sound systems engineering (SE) processes and effective use of SE tools. Unlike most large organisations, the Australian SMEs have not widely employed SE processes and tools in their endeavour. In addition, the SE software tools the Australian SMEs are currently using do not appear to have effectively aided them with their work. This paper describes research to develop a framework for aiding Australian SMEs in effectively acquiring and applying SE processes and tools and thereby improving their systems capability. Specifically, the research involves a collection and analysis of information about the fundamental nature of SMEs; an exploration of relationships between SE process and tools and the Australian SMEs; the development of requirements for SE tools functionality appropriate for SME needs; and the development of framework for acquiring and applying SE tools for SMEs. It also discusses the current outcomes of this research, which consist of a comprehensive research plan, a mapping of SE activities reported in INCOSE Symposia Proceedings (1994–2006) to the Hitchins‐Kasser‐Massie (HKM) framework, and a preliminary view of relationships between SMEs and SE tools. Finally, the final results of this research may be extendable to commercial and overseas SMEs.

Tools for Developing a Quality Management Program: Human Factors and Systems Engineering Tools

During the past 10 years, there has been growing acceptance and encouragement of partnerships between medical teams and engineers. Using human factors and systems engineering descriptions of process flows and operational sequences, the author's research laboratory has helped highlight opportunities for reducing adverse events and improving performance in health care and other high-consequence environments. This research emphasized studying human behavior that enhances system performance and a range of factors affecting adverse events, rather than a sole emphasis on human error causation. Developing a balanced evaluation requires novel approaches to causal analyses of adverse events and, more importantly, methods of recovery from adverse conditions. Recent work by the author's laboratory in collaboration with the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering has started to address possible improvements in taxonomies describing health care tasks. One major finding includes enhanced understanding of events and how event dynamics influence provider tasks and constraints. Another element of this research examines team coordination tasks that strongly affect patient care and quality management, but may be undervalued as "indirect patient care" activities.

Software & Systems Engineering Process and Tools for the Development of Autonomous Driving Intelligence

When a large number of people with heterogeneous knowledge and skills run a project together, it is important to use a sensible engineering process. This especially holds for a project building an intelligent autonomously driving car to participate in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. In this article, we present essential elements of a software and systems engineering process for the development of artificial intelligence capable of driving autonomously in complex urban situations. The process includes agile concepts, like test first approach, continuous integration of every software module and a reliable release and configuration management assisted by software tools in integrated development environments. However, the most important ingredients for an efficient and stringent development are the ability to efficiently test the behavior of the developed system in a flexible and modular simulator for urban situations. I. I ntroduction O CUSED research is often centered around interesting challenges and awards. The airplane industry started off with awards for the first flight over the British Channel as well as the Atlantic Ocean. The Human Genome Project, the Robo Cups and the series of DARPA Grand Challenges for autonomous vehicles serve this very same purpose to foster research and development in a particular direction. The 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge 16

4.4.3 Applying Measurement Principles and Adapting a Defect Predictability Model to Hardware Development

AbstractSoftware and Systems engineering are developing rich histories with measures and measurement tools to aid in project management. This paper addresses adapting those Software and System Engineering concepts and tools to a hardware development project.General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems (GDAIS) Mission Systems has been assessed as CMMI Level 5 rating November 2, 2005. using the CMMI‐SE/SW/IPPD/SS, V1.1, staged model.

6.1.2 Better use of Design Descriptions to embrace complexity and creativity in Systems Engineering

AbstractMost Systems Engineering practitioners now have access to Computer Aided Systems Engineering (CASE) tools that greatly assist with the engineering of complex problems. However, the productivity of these tools is often offset by the inability to effectively manage the large amounts of data associated with the system models offered by these engineering tools. As well as better CASE tools to improve productivity and success, we must not forget the role of innovation and creativity as a means of progressing solutions to engineering problems. This paper examines the use of the long standing practice of using ‘design descriptions’ and advocates that we formalize this approach by using Systems Engineering Design Descriptions to manage the engineering complexity and to embrace engineering creativity.

Reworking with a Legacy Financial Accounting System: Lessons from a Pharma Company

The issues of legacy systems become more pronounced at the time of a major IT upheaval such as implementation of ERP or business process reengineering (BPR) exercise. In this changing scenario, there is a need to update the systems and skills and integrate them with the emerging enterprisewide infrastructure. The main problems with a legacy system are that it remains insulated from the update attempt that largely follows market trend thus rendering it outdated and also that its documentation is poor. In this paper, the authors share the experiences of a project undertaken in one of India's leading multinational pharmaceutical companies (MPC) which was to rework on the existing legacy system and design a new application. The legacy system referred to here is the company's financial accounting system which was developed in 1993. Originally designed in COBOL, it was subsequently improved as and when the finance department put forth its requirements. The major downside of the system was that it had virtually no documentation and no one from the original team that developed the system was still working with the company. This made it all the more difficult to understand and document the system. Also, the system had a high response time thus leading to lower productivity of the data entry staff and other users. Further, it had a limited reporting capability and was basically used for storing financial data. When this project was undertaken for rework, the MPC was in the process of implementing an ERP package for its manufacturing and, therefore, it was necessary to bring all its applications to the same database structure. The most obvious question was whether to discard the legacy system and implement ERP's accounting module. The management, however, decided to retain and rework on the legacy system with the intention of integrating the new system with ERP. The driving point in favour of this decision was the realization that the legacy system was regarded as very critical for the accounting function and also that the users had become conversant with the system despite it being not very user-friendly. Also, there was no risk of failure. Incidentally, the review of the legacy system and ERP implementation coincided thereby easing out concerns of managing organizational changes as the company already had its strategy and preparedness in place for the scenario emerging out of ERP implementation. The computer-aided systems engineering (CASE) tool was chosen for designing the new system because of its inherent advantages in handling software projects which are as follows: The well-documented new system simplifies the maintenance jobs and, therefore, fewer people are required for its maintenance (this was the major problem with the previous system). It has removed the dependence of the management on a small set of people who specialized in the maintenance of an undocumented system. Financial reporting has become easier and better. The experience on this project made it amply clear that the top management support can make or mar a project. This is one of the most popular hypotheses in the information systems literature which has been found to be true in the case of the MPC.

Model transfer among CASE tools in systems engineering

Systems engineering as a core discipline of technical product development uses a variety of different Computer-Aided Systems Engineering (CASE) tools. Very often the need arises for data transfer between such tools. Currently, due to insufficient interface formats, a labor-intensive manual transfer of data is necessary. A step towards improving data exchange between systems engineering tools along the process life cycle is the definition of standard interface formats such as the application protocol (AP) framework of ISO Standards for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP). The aim of this paper is to analyze and evaluate the implementations of the Systems Engineering Data Representation and Exchange Standard (SEDRES/AP233) information model with regard to supporting data exchange, to propose improvements for the emerging modular AP233 ISO standard and to provide solutions for the observed problems. The solutions proposed in this paper were developed while designing, developing, and using a STEP ISO 10303–SEDRES conformant import and export interface for the tools Teamwork, Statemate, and the requirement management tool DOORS. The developed interfaces demonstrate that the SEDRES information model is an efficient medium for tool and vendor independent transfer of systems engineering information. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 8: 41–50, 2005

Model-based Concurrent Systems Design for Safety

This article describes a model of concurrent systems design for developing safety-critical systems. The developed model integrates system design, system safety analysis, and human factors. The model is able to develop the specifications for safety-critical systems easily. System safety analysis is a crucial part of the system effectiveness analysis for safety critical systems that require a concurrent systems design for safety (SDFS). This concurrent engineering approach is important during the early phase of the systems engineering process. The results of SDFS must be established during the early phase of the development life cycle to yield the architecture option satisfying the safety requirements. Evolution of computer technology has enabled engineers to perform more productive model-based systems engineering. A computer-aided systems engineering (CASysE) tool, CORE, is used to carry out the SDFS. The proposed method can provide the insight and traceability among requirements, functions, components, and the potential hazards. The application of the method to a commercial aircraft, one of the safety-critical systems, demonstrates utility of this model for concurrent SDFS. The method shows the concept of concurrent engineering during the system design while a specialty engineering analysis must be integrated. System engineers can efficiently develop the system specification considering system safety using this approach.

Object-oriented design tools for supramolecular devices and biomedical nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology provides multifunctional agents for in vivo use that increasingly blur the distinction between pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Realization of such therapeutic nanodevices requires multidisciplinary effort that is difficult for individual device developers to sustain, and identification of appropriate collaborations outside ones own field can itself be challenging. Further, as in vivo nanodevices become increasingly complex, their design will increasingly demand systems level thinking. System engineering tools such as object-oriented analysis, object-oriented design (OOA/D) and unified modeling language (UML) are applicable to nanodevices built from biological components, help logically manage the knowledge needed to design them, and help identify useful collaborative relationships for device designers. We demonstrate the utility of these systems engineering tools by reverse engineering an existing molecular device (the bacmid molecular cloning system) using them, and illustrate how object-oriented approaches identify fungible components (objects) in nanodevices in a way that facilitates design of families of related devices, rather than single inventions. We also explore the utility of object-oriented approaches for design of another class of therapeutic nanodevices, vaccines. While they are useful for design of current nanodevices, the power of systems design tools for biomedical nanotechnology will become increasingly apparent as the complexity and sophistication of in vivo nanosystems increases. The nested, hierarchical nature of object-oriented approaches allows treatment of devices as objects in higher-order structures, and so will facilitate concatenation of multiple devices into higher-order, higher-function nanosystems.

3.6.2 Using a Rapid Incremental Solution Construction Approach to Maximise the Completeness and Correctness of a Set of Requirements for a System

AbstractWhile the problem of poor requirements engineering and management has been documented since the dawn of systems engineering the continual documentation and discussion of the problem requirements has not resulted in a practical solution to the problem. This paper discusses applying the Blackboard methodology used in Artificial Intelligence to the development of a suite of Computer Enhanced Systems Engineering (CESE) tools that may be able to alleviate much of the problem. The paper also describes conceptual prototypes of the tools that have already been developed, their effect on alleviating the problem of poor requirements, and some concepts for future tools in the suite.

5.8.3 Modelling Integrated Systems Architectures

AbstractThe Navy's Chief Engineering Office (RDA/CHENG) is attempting to establish an advanced methodology for performing “Capability‐based” system acquisition. This requires the modelling of a “Mission‐oriented” Battle‐force where the contributions of each system, and future system concepts, can be assessed in terms of mission effectiveness. The Naval Collaborative Engineering Environment (NCEE) has been established to support this large‐scale engineering effort and the Authors are working towards a modelling framework which properly captures a Mission Capability Portfolio of systems. In addition, the modelling approach is based on the DOD C4ISR Architecture Framework1, and provides a basis for translating the Operational, System, and Technical Views into System Engineering Models. Furthermore, a significant challenge facing this modelling effort is the capture of the emerging concepts driving Network‐centric warfare. CORE, a commercial Systems Engineering tool, is being utilized to support this modelling effort.

2.5.2 Modeling and Simulation of Military System Architectures Using CORE®

AbstractThis paper describes the analysis of a hypothetical command and control architecture for a proposed future land force conducting maneuver operations under various conditions. The Systems Engineering tool CORE® has been used to capture the user needs, and to develop a hierarchy of functions necessary to implement the proposed command and control system. CORE also facilitates behavioral modeling of the functional architecture. This paper shows how the tool can be used to analyze the performance of candidate physical architectures based on a common functional architecture. The models that are formed serve as valuable aids for the user to evaluate novel operational concepts, and for the system architects to determine productive areas for research into improving technological support for command and control.

9.2.3 A Sublayer Generation of System Architecture Using the Model Based Systems Engineering Tool

AbstractThis paper describes a set of practical methods and templates developed to practice the Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), a computer‐aided systems engineering, in an efficient manner. It also shows the steps to build more credible data model. The scope of the work includes the systems engineering engine process which represents the requirements analysis, functional analysis/allocation, and synthesis. This work focuses on the functional architecture generation. The SE engine process is tailored to accommodate the specific needs encountered from practical applications of the MBSE. The outcome of the work includes the templates for requirement and scenario description methods essential to construct MBSE database. To ensure the model credibility, the study presents the use of belief criteria.