New architectures in systems engineering

This article was written by Peter Siwon who has written about this topic in the past in the context of embedded development.

The technical article by Peter Siwon is entitled Project management: Trends in embedded software development has a different focus than this blog. Nevertheless, many of the ideas are also relevant to systems engineering, and the trends identified can also be found in SE, even if they manifest themselves differently there.

But first a brief look at the topic of architecture: this enables scaling and reuse, important topics in order to be able to react quickly to the market. Reacting quickly to trends here can give you a decisive competitive advantage.

New component architectures

To start at the bottom: Some of the components that make up systems are fundamentally different from what was state of the art a few decades ago. Peter Siwon focuses here in particular on processor architectures, in this case multicore, which is finding its way into the embedded sector. However, I would like to expand on this trend. Additive manufacturing processes ("3D printing") make other architectures possible, as do microservices in software development. It is worth looking carefully at the "smallest units" and analyzing whether new architectures have a lasting impact on them.

Interdisciplinary work

I recently published an article on this topic in the IREB magazine: What is a Useful Perspective in Considering Requirements Engineering Relative to Systems Engineering? The article is about the fact that it is often not clearly understood what "interdisciplinary" actually means. A distinction must be made between interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary. Without going into detail here: It is necessary to recognize one's own discipline taking into account the other disciplines into the development process. If this is not explicitly enforced, it can quickly fall by the wayside.

Dismantle legacy issues

With established companies, the temptation to make incremental changes is great. And in the end, the result is "only" cosmetic improvements. A good example is the automotive industry: what companies like Daimler and Audi publicly in keynotes is an iterative improvement of the status quo. But in this way, it is not possible to arrive at an architecture such as that of Tessla (as described in of this keynote was described). Time will tell whether this is enough or not.

Conclusion

The world is currently undergoing huge changes. While the mixture of electronics and mechanics (mechatronics) is now well understood, the presence of software, combined with networking, is causing huge changes. Of course, tried and tested technology should not be thrown out of the window. But new challenges require new architectures. Dwelling on an architecture that does not meet the requirements of today's systems can be fatal.

Photo by louis amal on Unsplash