Using model-driven approach for engineering the System Engineering System

Abstract

Naval ships building requires numerous domains of expertise raising a major challenge to design, produce, support and retire a system that is composed of thousands of equipment’s and features, and which will be operated by different navies for several missions around the globe. Coming with the digitalization of the ships, the success of MBSE (Model-Based System Engineering) approach in software-intensive systems has led major industrial actors, of which Naval Group, to adopt MBSE for large scale projects. Nowadays industry has to go further, as more and more systems have interactions between each other in a systems-of-systems prospective, as well as MBSE is becoming more mature. One major challenge is to run an efficient system engineering process, because it will secure the following other phases of the product lifecycle. The system engineering system required for an Aircraft-carrier, frigates and submarines design and development involves numerous companies and teams, in several domains of expertise. The number and the complexity of the involved enabling systems are also important: requirement and quality management tools, modelling and simulation tools, 3D design tools, etc… The communications between those teams, as well as the interfaces between those tools, are key points for a good design phase. So this paper proposes to take an MBSE approach to enhance these communications during the engineering phases, and to enable this integration between the different enabling systems that supports the engineering process. Another advantage is to establish the numerical continuum between the several engineering levels, domains and data, and to enhance automation of this integration by using the power of the model-based standards and associated frameworks. The innovation comes from the idea of engineering a new enabling system, able to define the system engineering integrated toolchain, tailored for each complex socio-technical system engineering process, and that this engineering is not performed by tool vendor, but by the target program team. So to define this system, we have tried to apply the fundamental principles of system engineering, onto the engineering system it-self, within a model-based approach: (i) the specification first, by giving more details on the motivations, second by expressing a simple set of requirements, modelled in a set of functions; (ii) the enterprise architecture modelling through a set of artefacts representing the System Engineering meta-model, and a first level of allocation; (iii) At last, as an early validation phase, where the relevancy and benefits of this approach will be discussed.