Trends and debates: Highlights of ReConf 2024

This year's ReConf came to an end yesterday. As always, the conference was well attended and is still highly topical even after 21 years. The presentations were high-caliber, the exchange was interesting as always, and the participants were a healthy mix of old and new faces. Below is a brief review of the most important highlights.

AI everywhere

The topic Artificial intelligence was so dominant that it had its own track on both days. And some of the other tracks also touched on the topic of AI. So it's no wonder that there was also a keynote on the topic of AI.

I wasn't able to attend every AI lecture. Of the ones I did attend, I was left with AI in RE: added value, methods, future by Jens Kawelke and Finn Laßmann were particularly memorable. Among other things, they demonstrated the use of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to create a specifically trained Large Language Model (LLM). Users can then interact with Codebeamer via a chat interface, for example to request information about specific projects or generate test cases, which the assistant then automatically inserts correctly linked into Codebeamer.

Keynote on AI by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Roman Dumitrescu

I had seen several keynotes on AI over the last 12 months, and this was by far the best! Under the title Prompt-Driven Engineering: How Generative AI is transforming development work Roman Dumitrescu vividly illustrated what is possible today and what will soon be possible.

Open Large Language Models (LLM) are getting better and better, so we don't need to invest millions to develop our own LLMs, we get them for free!

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Roman Dumitrescu

Roman's coworkers had a lot of fun using him as a guinea pig for all kinds of case studies, which made the talk very entertaining. The talk addressed the needs of ReConf attendees in many ways. It was only through his presentation that I learned that magazines for primary school children are already publishing articles on the use of ChatGPT. Or that BMW is planning to use the Figure One robot in factories in the USA. Or how 3D models can be generated from photographed Lego models for rapid prototyping.

If you would like to know more, you can watch the 24-minute video ChatGPT & Co.: AI as a game changer for product innovations? on Youtube.

Factory show: RE and MBSE

As an interactive evening event on the first evening Andreas Willert and Rupert Wiebelwhat the future of requirements engineering (RE) and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) will be. The debate was characterized by the online debate of recent weeks as to whether MBSE is dying or not.

A completely informal hand vote showed that MBSE was considered neither dead nor alive by the participants. Rupert confirmed that MBSE is in crisis and Andreas reiterated his point that we must be careful that SysML does not suffer the same fate as UML. He sees UML as burnt, at least for the use case of code generation (hyped in the 2000s).

Andreas cited Simulink as a positive example of modeling; in addition to simulation, he also sees code generation as a killer app for MBSE.

Without productive benefits, models will soon be dead.

Andreas Willert

The fear of silo formation at MBSE came from the participants, which Rupert in particular confirmed. Another comment pointed out that customers often still have a lot of preparatory work to do before the introduction of modeling can be considered. Perhaps it is still too early for MBSE after all?

MBSE at Airbus

But there are also positive examples. In addition to the obligatory presentation on SysML v2, Airbus gave the excellent presentation How can requirements engineering and model-based systems engineering be successfully combined? by Christoph Pfeuffer and Sebastian Strobl. There, modeling with Cameo is used successfully, but the potential of MBSE is far from exhausted.

In a conversation with a BMW employee, I learned that MBSE is also practiced very successfully there. Unfortunately, there is nothing about this that I am allowed to publish.

ReqIF 1.3

Readers of this blog know that I am involved in the standardization process of the Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) was involved. So of course I was very curious about the lecture ReqIF 1.3 & other challenges in ReqIF data exchange by Moritz Schamal and Nikolai Stein.

It is not yet clear if and when ReqIF 1.3 will be released. It is also unclear how much will change at all. The topic is currently being discussed in the ProSTEP Implementation Forum. If this group makes a proposal, it must first be approved by the OMG. The standard will definitely not be published this year.

Common language in product development.

My own lecture was about language under the title Goodbye Babel: Practical ways to a common language in product development. At first glance, it may seem surprising that the topic of AI or modeling does not appear in the title, as I have worked a lot with both topics in recent years.

Nevertheless, it was also indirectly about language helping us to master complexity: Today's generative AI works best by far with written language, and modeling requires a modeling language.

Keynote: What will the weather be like?

As always, there was an excellent keynote on the second day of ReConf, which is only indirectly linked to the theme of the conference. This time, Claudia Kleinert spoke in an entertaining and engaging way on the topic of Climate change - threat and opportunity. For us Systems Engineers, the keyword is sustainability. Claudia's appeal was aimed at the right audience that can actively help to tackle the climate crisis.