DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FOR ENGINEERING

In the last decade, hundreds of companies have adopted MBSE in order to improve their systems engineering capabilities, and tens of thousands of practitioners got trained on numerous components of the approach. The scarce skills in this arena is the ability to devise and lead the successful adoption of MBSE as the approach to large scale engineering projects.

Focus Your Transition on Practice Reconfiguration First

We follow a proven and comprehensive digital transformation methodology for introducing MBSE in existing engineering environments. The methodology produces a workplan specific to the transitioning organization and its full lifecycle development requirements.

"Practice reconfiguration" means catering to the concerns of the development stakeholders first: if you are a system engineer, scientist, enterprise software developer, or a technical manager, how will your daily practices change?

MBSE adoption entails training for modeling tools, languages, methods and understanding how to build architectural models, metamodels, and a range of advanced capabilities, such as, model transformation and simulation.

Model Based System Engineering (MBSE)

Introducing MBSE in your environment requires that you organize around 4 distinct but related dimensions: Tools, methodology, languages and architecture. Each dimension is a separate domain of knowledge that are mutually orthogonal. This means every concern we will treat as a plot point in a 4D frame of reference, that is, we treat every MBSE concern as existing in all four dimensions at the same time.

Methodology: Encompasses the development process, practices, methods, techniques, communication models, ways by which languages are applied, ways by which ontologies are used, work principles, styles, conventions, etc.

Languages: The abstract and domain-specific languages used for communication and for producing formal specifications. This domain includes defining ontologies, constraint languages, transformation languages, and the development of “metamodels” for non-standard and domain-specific languages. In advanced MBSE environments, these will be languages that will be used in the “high order” generative processes in a Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®) style approach.

Tooling: Tools, infrastructure frameworks and utilities that support all practices of the other 3 dimensions. This includes architectural transformative capabilities, model generation, and process as well as architectural validation and verification rules.

Architecture: The specification of abstract and concrete platforms expressed in terms of: principles; rules; what to organize around (organization); and the specific structures with properties and their relationships (structure) used to formally build systems. In an MBSE environment with model-driven capabilities, architecture is “encoded” in the transformation technologies supported by the tools. Transformation technologies constitute “high order” generative processes and they replace manual activities of the basic MBSE development approach.