Prostep ivip Symposium: Collaboration in Systems Engineering
Yesterday, on September 2, 2020, the Prostep ivip Symposium took place, one of the first conferences I have attended since Covid-19. Of course, I attended virtually. As always, there were many exciting and inspiring presentations. I would like to give a brief impression of the event and will summarize a presentation by Peter Gerber, "Collaborative Systems Engineering", which was interesting for SE-Trends.
Conferences in Corona times
Prostep ivip has set the bar extremely high for online conferences: The event was streamed in excellent quality and professionally recorded in the studio by Yasmine Blair moderated. The organizers promised to publish all presentations shortly at Youtube to be published. About 1000 people had registered. I do not know how many took part in the end.
It was a shame that there was only a very limited opportunity to exchange ideas with the participants. A chat was activated before the start and during the one break, but not much more happened than "Good morning from the Danube Valley". During the conference, the chat could only be used to ask questions, which were answered at the end of each presentation.
Collaborative Systems Engineering
In his presentation, Peter Gerber presented the results of several Prostep working groups, which are traditionally referred to as "forums". His work is driven by the challenge of mastering the transition from product to service. As Daimler is also involved in this working group, the focus here was on the transition from cars to mobility. However, we find the same challenge with many other products.
Many product manufacturers are faced with the challenge of mastering the transition from product to service.
Such a transition is an intensive team activity that must result in a service that is superior to that of the competition in all relevant functions. This transition requires collaborative systems engineering across company boundaries.
SysML for the master plan
To accomplish such a task, we need a master plan that all participants can use as a guide. Unstructured formats ("flipchart") are no longer sufficient here, so the working groups rely on SysML for the architecture. This is intended to support three activities:
- Support for requirements management - A picture is worth a thousand words, and many pictures (views) can be derived from one model. The SysML architecture model should therefore serve as the foundation for requirements management.
- Support for V&V activities - In particular function-oriented architectures support the verification and validation activities, for example by deriving test cases.
- Collaboration across company boundaries - Even though there are many other ways to collaborate with SysML, the working group focuses in particular on the exchange across company boundaries, which can be realized via workflows.
Workflows as a solution approach
The working groups have a strong focus on workflows that control the exchange of models. This reminds me strongly of my own activities in ProStep ivip when I was still in the ReqIF Implementor Forum (IF) was active. And this forum did indeed serve as a template for the activities of these working groups. The ReqIF IF was about the exchange of requirements, which is now supported by all relevant requirements management tools. This presentation is now about the exchange of architecture models. As SysML is very comprehensive, the working groups have defined a minimum set of information for the exchange. To drive this forward, there will be a SysML Implementor Forum (IF) at Prostep ivip next year. The aim is to involve tool manufacturers in the IF in order to implement the results of the SysML Workflow Forum (WF) in terms of tool technology. Of course, there is also a lively exchange with the GfSE and OMG.
Cross-Discipline Lifecycle Collaboration (CDLC)
However, workflows are only part of the solution that is intended to solve today's challenges. The topic of Cross-Discipline Lifecycle Collaboration (CDLC) was addressed several years ago at Prostep ivip, also as part of a forum. The forum has now completed this work and implemented a demonstrator as one of the results. The results are being taken up by a follow-up project founded this year, the Interdisciplinary MBSE Collaboration Framework. This will be based as much as possible on existing technologies.
Collaboration in systems engineering is a huge challenge that aims to create model-based traceability across company boundaries that brings clear benefits. Even if all these working groups have completed their work in a few years, we are certainly not there yet - but hopefully a good deal closer.
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash
