Model-Based Systems Engineering as an Enabler of Agility

Abstract

Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) with agility can help systems engineering programs which deal with both increasing complexity and frequent changes in environment and usages, shorter time-to-market, uncertainty of the needs, and more sophisticated industrial schemes. Agile approaches originated in software engineering can be extended and tailored to a certain extent to complex systems engineering and particularly to MBSE. Main benefits of agility are provision of a minimum viable product as early as possible in the schedule, early capture of changes of needs, enabling to deliver a system answering to the real needs, and securing of the value proposal. It includes also potential reduction in rework of the final system through regular customer feedback throughout development (left shift for the defect correction with early exposure), and efficiency of the use of resources. Concerning MBSE, the use of models as a single source of truth for completeness and consistency is useful to share and secure the design by improving communication within engineering teams and the building and support of the development strategy, and to help to automate some tasks such as model exchange and synchronization. In addition to the benefits of each approach, combining them may help to:

• ▪ Organize and synchronize the development and validation effort of one or multiple engineering teams.
• ▪ Faster impact analysis including trade-off studies/options and hence a faster reaction to evolutions in expectations and constraints, that is, the agility of systems.
• ▪ Show regularly “end to end” value to the customer and other stakeholders.