Anatoly Levenchuk's Runglish Blog

At EuSEC 2010 in Stockholm (May 2010) INCOSE European chapter leaders stated that «INCOSE SE VISION 2020 should be updated by bottom-up procedure starting from local chapter’s visions of SE challenges». This work was already started by France and Russian chapters.

INCOSE Russian chapter in 2009-2010 have had 32 biweekly regular meetings and one 2-day Workshop (March 2010) to discuss SE challenges in Russian language. Systems Engineering Challenges Workshop (RuSEC 2010, http://rise-russia.org/rusec2010) with international participation was 23-24 of September’10 in Moscow, Russia.

INCOSE Member Board co-chair Asmus Pandikow was with us in Moscow and delivered a talk in behalf of INCOSE Central and Europe.

In average there was about 70 people attended most complex talks of second day. Workshop started with 350 engineers and engineering managers, but after first day most of the managers and engineers leave due to very high technical level of discussions – we were not aimed for pop and easy SE but hard core one, that correspond complex nature of SE project in 2020..

RuSEC 2010 had successfully brought together leaders of three communities: systems engineers, situational method engineers, industrial ontologists. At this Workshop INCOSE Russian chapter proposed a project that can help to capture knowledge about SE 2020. We need to:

• Provide structured description of SE (Body of Knowledge) as a cohesive set of method components that can be assembled for a specific SE project to form a particular SE method (example of this form of representation you can find at http://opfro.org that have more than 1100 systems engineering method components. Chairman of OPEN Consortium that delivered this SE knowledge capturing and structuring project Donald Firesmith was present at RuSEC 2010 and agree to participate with initial content of this SE method catalog).

• Provide that these method components fit to ISO 24744 development process metamodel. Developers of ISO 24744 were present at our Workshop and agree with our initiative.

• Provide that these method components expressed in form of ontology to participate in federation of semantic Reference Data Libraries (industrial ontology-based knowledge bases that defined in ISO 15926). Project manager of devoted to building operational top-level Reference Data Library JORD project of POSC Caesar Associations and FIATECH consortium (https://www.posccaesar.org/wiki/PCA/Filatech) and developers of ISO 15926 was present at our Workshop and agree to collaborate with INCOSE in establishing this SE method RDL.

• Provide that content of this systems engineering knowledge base correspond not to SE 2010 (like BKCASE and SE Handbook) but to updated SE VISION 2020 and have answers to systems engineering challenges. This is primary goal of RuSEC Workshop: have a model-based and ontology-based vision of model-based and ontology-based systems engineering (happy to have this «meta» in description).

This project can combine ontology form and SE content with situational method engineering as foundational glue between the form and the content. All presentations delivered at RuSEC 2010 tell us that this project is extremely hard to complete but there is no fundamental obstacles to this.

Current INCOSE SE VISION 2020 INCOSE-TP-2004-004-02, V2.03, September 2007 (http://incose.org/ProductsPubs/pdf/SEVision2020_20071003_v2_03.pdf) need to be updated to reflect advances in SE that was in place since 2007 when this vision was approved.

INCOSE Russian chapter suggests (http://www.slideshare.net/ailev/systems-engineering-challenges) that systems engineering body of knowledge should be expressed according to ISO 24744 metamodel not only in case of already established knowledge but also in case of challenges. According to ISO 24744 development method metamodel we can structure discussion of SE challenges in following focus areas:

Meta-level (SE as a whole):

• SE vs. “Plain Engineering”, Art, Science.
• Systems thinking (notions of System, System-of-Systems, holon, etc.)
• SE Pragmatic (mitigating risks only vs. positive value adding).
• Let’s borrow ideas from software engineering immediately, not after 10-15 years delay.
• «Brave new SE» (a blend of model-based, semantically-enabled, cost-based, generative, SoSetc.) vs. “traditional SE”.
• Demystification of “SE Art”: SE Knowledge discovery vs. SE Knowledge design (Engineering of Systems Engineering).
• SE Knowledge modeling/capture and management: Situational method engineering (OMG SPEM, ISO 24744, SEMAT) and SE Method catalogs (method elements repositories – OPFRO) and BoK (BKCASE).
• SE Ontology (System-of-Systems debate, 4D-debate, etc.).
• SE Vocabulary (national/industry specific).
• Industry-specific adoptions of SE. «Defense accent» of SE.

StageKinds (TimeCycleKinds)

• TimeCycle (LifeCycle) management methods: Agile vs. Waterfall; Lean, Six Sigma and TOC in SE; etc.
• TimeCycles coordination for SoS, multi-contractor work (e.g. DEMO organization engineering framework).
• Project Management in SE (inside or outside)?
• What school of project management (PMBoK, PRINCE2, P2M, TOC, LastPlanner, constraints planning, etc.)?
• TimeCycle methods with Integral Teams, Virtual Collaboration, etc.

WorkUnitKinds(SE disciplines, practices, processesetc.)

• Traditional set for modern (model-based, semantically-enabled, cost-based, generative, etc.) SE :

• requirements engineering
• safety and security engineering
• Engineering of system architecture
• Design
• Configuration management
• Integration
• Verification and Validation
• …..

• Or completely new set of disciplines?!

• TBD (e.g. High-level modeling)
• TBD (e.g. Low-level modeling)
• TBD (Generative manufacturing)
• …

WorkProductKinds:

• Megamodel as first class WorkProductKind (configuration management of megamodel)
• System of Systems / Family of Systems
• Technology Platform/Generation and technology as system-of-interest
• Human-based system (including enterprise engineering)

ModelKinds, Languages (Metamodels), Notations:

• Multiparadigm modeling (SysML, ModelicaML, OPDM, knowledge representation languages)
• Engineering/Architecture Metamodels/Frameworks (UPDM etc.)
• Engineering DSLs (like P&ID) vs. Universal Engineering Languages (like SysML or AADL)
• Semantic/ontology-based megamodel integration (Simantics, ISO 15926, etc.)
• Specific metamodels for SE disciplines:
• Requirements discovery/engineering (e.g. stakeholder models, GORE frameworks and standards, etc.)
• Cost models
• Engineering of system architecture (UPDM, MFESA etc.)
• Generative design
• Assurance case, design rationale and other reasoning capture models

ProducerKinds

• People

• Roles of systems engineer (requirements engineer, systems architect, configuration manager, V&V authority, security and safety engineer etc.). How to build SE team with these roles?
• SE Education (continuous education: 1 year experience repeated 20 times should not count as “20 years of experience”)

• Tools

• CAD/CAM/CAME/PLM/Wiki/Social networks/etc.: what services/tools will support SE in 2020? Data-centric vs. Document-centric, Semantic vs. Vocabulary, Model transformation vs. Model editing, etc.

[This post was submitted to be published in INCOSE INSIGHT]

Speakers from UK, USA, Spain and Finland: