Reliability assessments of mechatronic systems, considering covariates, are becoming more complex not just as a result of the integration of more diverse technologies into such systems but also because of increasing complexities in system topology; but traditional reliability assessment models with covariates tend to ignore the influence of system topology. This paper addresses such an exclusion and

An observed increase in systems scale and complexity has led to a significant momentum in exploring, identifying, and adopting model based systems engineering (MBSE) tools and techniques amongst research communities and industry practitioners. Several attempts to transform systems design and engineering practices through the use of MBSE in academia and industry has led to a considerable increase in

There is an increased complexity in applied research projects that demand more researcher skills, especially in managing the research project and interdisciplinary work. Researchers receive little training in how to manage such projects, yet most manage to deliver project results. There is a tradition of project management and systems engineering which benefits complex development projects in industrial

Industry 4.0 is changing data collection, storage, and analysis in industrial processes fundamentally, enabling novel applications such as flexible manufacturing of highly customized products. However, real-time control of these processes has not yet realized its full potential in using the collected data to drive further development. Indeed, typical industrial control systems are tailored to the plant

This paper presents the Evolvability Analysis Framework (EAF), a new perspective on evaluating complex infrastructure systems. EAF enables decision makers to explore alternative transition paths, thus providing several multi-step options to achieve a desired end state. These multi-step transition paths can be particularly valuable when they mitigate the impact of system degradation during the deployment

An optimal trade-off between resilience (the ability to survive and recover from disruptions) and affordability is highly desirable in System of Systems (SoS) architectures. However, it is difficult to design SoS architectures for these goals as existing resilience evaluation methods require detailed disruption models that are not readily available in the early stages of design. Biological ecosystems

The systems-engineering context of the solid waste disposal problem is discussed with a focus on the issues in Saudi Arabia. A methodology was developed for dividing the system of interest into a set of weakly-coupled sub-systems that interact with the narrow system of interest. A model of the narrow system of interest, in this case the municipal solid waste (MSW) system of Saudi Arabia, was then created

Numerous systems engineering (SE) methods for the model-based and textual specification of systems focus on managing complexity solely by partitioning the system based on physical structures or by defining different views of the system and therefore reach their limits in agile development. The increasing demand for an agile system development requires an agile systems engineering procedure for the

Increasing system complexity requires that engineers, systems analysts, and program managers use comprehensive design methodologies to deliver affordable and resilient designs. One method is set-based design (SBD), a product development and managerial process distinctly suited for developing complex systems under uncertainty. SBD simultaneously develops, analyzes, and matures numerous potential design

A simulation can be a complex architecture of simulation models, simulation tools, and computing hardware. However, its development often relies on informal procedures and can begin without a clear, complete, and formal definition of the simulation needs. Simulation traceability is then compromised, which prevents from easily validating whether a simulation meets the needs, or understanding the purpose

Engineering complex systems is an exercise in sequential multiobjective decision making under uncertainty. One method for handling this complexity and uncertainty is set-based design (SBD). SBD is a concurrent engineering and management methodology that develops, analyzes, and matures numerous design options, reducing risk and delivering higher value to the stakeholders and end users. SBD accomplishes

The Submarine Warfare Federated Tactical Systems (SWFTS) is a rapidly evolving combat system of systems (SoS) product family. Managing the annual baseline updates requires processing thousands of baseline change requests, then coordinating and verifying their implementation. The complexity of this effort, which involves well over ten million source-lines-of-code (SLOC) as well as Commercial-Off-the-Shelf

Costs to replace obsolete parts are estimated to exceed $10 billion annually for military expenditures.1 Other industries experience high costs related to obsolete parts as well.2–5 Synergies between Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and modular design concepts should be leveraged to reduce those costs early in the design process. To date, obsolescence management, MBSE, and modularity have been

This paper proposes a framework using a community maturity level metric to determine the integration readiness of interface elements in a particular network cluster. As a proof of concept this methodology is applied to an aircraft seating system to assess the readiness of complex interfaces before proceeding to full-scale production and systems integration. A multi-objective genetic algorithm, MOGA-Net

The purpose of this paper is to broaden the practical notion of Taguchi's Quality Loss Function (QLF) from a static, one-stage concept into a dynamic time-varying tool. Taguchi challenged the old-age notion of engineering tolerance and proposed a quadratic QLF that quantifies loss to society, caused by deviation of products and systems from their target values. Accordingly, design engineers attempt

This paper proposes a Model-Driven Architecture approach for the development of an embedded system validation platform namely Model-Based Security Analysis for Embedded Systems (MBSAES). The security properties are formally modeled and verified at an early stage of the design process of the system, which helps to reduce late errors and development time. A separation of the attack scenarios and the

The venue of new technologies such as autonomous vehicles implies the design not only of the product but also of services related to it. These systems are known as Product Service Systems (PSS). Moreover, they are not only PSS but also System of Systems (SoS). Up till now, research has been addressing the design of PSS and SoS separately. The PSS literature focuses mainly on the product servitization

Product development efforts now more than ever are in need of methodologies that can address the challenges of increased system complexities, shortening time to market, increased demands in mass customization, market instabilities, geographical barriers, improved innovation, and adaptability to emerging technologies. To address these challenges most companies will need to make key decisions early in

In,1 there is an error in the received date of the published article. It should have read the received date as 6 May 2020.

System design and engineering involves making decisions involving multiple stakeholders with diverse and, potentially conflicting, objectives. As more and more data become available with digital engineering, big data, and data science, trade‐off analytics will be an increasing important tool for engineers. We used a structured literature survey with Web of Science key words and bibliographic, categorical

Non‐functional requirements (NFRs) play a significant role in the software development process. However, the classical requirement prioritization methods for incremental software development, typically, consider the attributes of functional features only, often neglecting the non‐functional constraints. This might lead to catastrophic defects in the system design, as the conflicts among the NFRs are

This study compares the types and quantities of knowledge that are captured by a model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) approach and a traditional architecting approach to measure the benefits of the MBSE approach in managing the complexity of a robotic space system. The MBSE approach was implemented with Cameo Systems Modeler using Systems Modeling Language (SysML) and applied to architecting an orbiting

This work presents a model of the process of conceptual design studies which use the concurrent engineering approach. Concurrent conceptual design is an integrated system development approach, to rapidly explore feasible design solutions by parallelizing the work of experts. This approach is characterized by a multidisciplinary team of experts collaborating in a co-located manner. Albeit the conceptual

This paper evaluates perception of complexity in a novel explanatory model that relates product performance and engineering effort. Complexity is an intermediate factor with two facets: it enables desired product performance but also requires effort to achieve. Three causal mechanisms explain how exponential growth bias, excess complexity, and differential perception lead to effort overruns. Secondary

The Department of Defense (DoD) is experimenting with acquisition strategies intended to deliver new capabilities in cycle times of 2 to 5 years. These are executed in a market of few sellers, limited procurement quantities, and constrained budgets. Defense contractors respond by developing, producing, and supporting products.

The pressure on systems engineering is ever-increasing to support the development and implementation of systems that meet a complex environment's demands. As a growing discipline, systems engineering requires insight into past research to identify opportunities for future growth. Analyzing the bibliometric data on published research provides valuable information on a scientific discipline's past progress

Systems of systems (SoSs) constitute a particular class of systems, whose constituents are themselves systems in their own right. Such systems present architectures that dynamically change in a way that is not necessarily intended at the time of design. We target a kind of SoS that is subject to evolutionary development and propose a reconfiguration design process that guides the architect in charge

The literature shows disparities in how fundamental systems engineering concepts in the area of requirements engineering, such as stakeholder needs, system requirements, requirements elicitation, requirements derivation, and requirements decomposition, are used within the communities‐of‐practice and in research. Such disparities can lead to conceptual and application inconsistencies, which have been

An open area of research for complex, cyber‐physical systems is how to adequately support decision making using reliability and failure data early in the systems engineering process. Having meaningful reliability and failure data available early offers information to decision makers at a point in the design process where decisions have a high impact to cost ratio. When applied to conceptual system

Complex systems typically have a large parameter space and by definition have the potential for strong emergent behavior, especially when operating in a complex environment. A method is needed to design a system that will be resilient in a complex target operating environment. Here, we propose a maximin optimization approach to support the exploration of system design, based on co‐evolutionary system/environment

Large‐scale systems engineering projects consist of hundreds to thousands of agents (stakeholders, managers, designers, etc.) spread across the organizational hierarchy. Each of these agents possesses knowledge in some form or the other, be it the knowledge of stakeholder needs, domain‐specific knowledge, knowledge of rules and regulations, knowledge gained from experience on previous projects, etc

Verification activities, such as inspection, testing, analysis, and demonstration, improve one's confidence in the system meeting the system requirements during the development process. Frequent verification is often advocated as a strategy that minimizes costs of rework over the entire design process, where frequent verification involves verifying after any change in the design. However, this strategy

Industry 4.0 is the latest paradigm of industrial production enabling a new level of organizing and controlling the entire value chain within a product life cycle by creating a dynamic and real‐time understanding of cross‐company behaviors. It is expected to have a considerable impact in the oil and gas (O&G) sector by revolutionizing current predictive maintenance and operation optimization. There

Traditional document‐based practices in systems engineering are being transitioned to model‐based ones. Adoption of model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) continues to grow in industry and government, and MBSE continues to be a major research theme in the systems engineering community. In fact, MBSE remains a central element in the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE)’s vision for

The integration of complex systems is an important aspect of systems engineering. This paper defines six integration principles to consider when planning and executing system development and integration processes. This paper describes these integration principles and validates them through a historical system survey. The 14 systems studied represent both integration successes and integration failures

Evaluating the complexity of an engineered system is challenging for any organization, even more so when operating in a System‐of‐Systems (SoS) context. Here, we analyze one particular decision support tool as an illustratory case study. This tool has been used for several years by Thales Group to evaluate system complexity across a variety of industrial engineering projects. The case study is informed

In recent years there has been increased demand for readiness and availability metrics across many industries and especially in national defense to enable data‐driven decision making at all levels of planning, maintenance, and operations, and in leveraging integrated models that inform stakeholders of current operational system health and performance metrics. The digital twin (DT) has been identified

As of today, most specifications of technical systems still rely on requirements written in natural language. However, this approach is known to be problem‐prone, due to the inherent ambiguity of natural languages. On the other hand, fully formal or model‐based approaches seem to be out of reach in many practical cases, especially in early design phases of systems. In this article, we study how to

System‐of‐Systems capability is inherently tied to the participation and performance of the constituent systems and the network performance which connects the systems together. It is imperative for the SoS stakeholders to quantify the SoS capability and performance to any uncertain variations in the system participation and network outages so that the system participation is incentivized and network

Current requirements for the reduction of CO2 emissions, as well as for the improvement of durability and reliability of sociotechnical systems such as passenger cars, lead to an increase in development effort in order to increase efficiency and system lifetime. Tribological systems play an essential role in the development of sociotechnical systems, but have proved to be particularly complex. The

The COVID‐19 pandemic has caught many nations by surprise and has already caused millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. It has also exposed a deep crisis in modeling and exposed a lack of systems thinking by focusing mainly on only the short term and thinking of this event as only a health crisis. In this paper, authors from several of the key countries involved in COVID‐19

Complex adaptive systems (CAS) exhibit emergent behaviors caused by the nonlinear actions between individual components within the system and their environment. These emergent behaviors are difficult to predict and measure making it very challenging to initially design from the start. Developing CASs, such as an autonomous swarming unmanned system, is a relevant key task today for solving hard problems

Prior advances in systems engineering (SE) theory were instrumental in defining the discipline and its tools, but are limited in perspective. The SE community needs new theoretical advances to address its existing and emerging sociotechnical challenges. This communication paper is a product of an NSF/SERC/INCOSE funded workshop on theory building in SE with a focus on the use of abstraction and elaboration

There is an urgent need for more efficient and resilient infrastructure systems to support a growing population with increasingly scarce resources worldwide. As the demand for limited natural and man‐made resources grows, improved methods for resolving anticipated and unforeseen conflicts of availability are needed. System automation has broadly been adopted for efficiency optimization and resource

Despite a wealth of system architecture frameworks and methodologies available, approaches to evaluate the robustness and resiliency of architectures for complex systems or systems of systems are few in number. As a result, system architects may turn to graph‐theoretic methods to assess architecture robustness and vulnerability to cascading failure. Here, we explore the application of such methods

Despite many uncertainties, industrial fields such as energy (eg, oil rigs), utilities infrastructure (eg, telecommunications), space systems, transportation systems, construction, and manufacturing make large and mostly irreversible investments in systems with potentially long life cycles. The life cycle value of such systems may be increased significantly by designing in the flexibility to make future

How should organizations approach the evaluation of system complexity at the early stages of system design in order to inform decision making? Since system complexity can be understood and approached in several different ways, such evaluation is challenging. In this study, we define the term “system complexity factors” to refer to a range of different aspects of system complexity that may contribute

Increasing system complexity has provided the impetus to develop new and novel systems engineering methodologies. One of these methodologies is set‐based design (SBD), a concurrent design methodology well suited for complex systems subject to significant uncertainty. Since the 1990s, numerous private, public, and defense sector design programs have successfully implemented SBD. However, concerns regarding

The development of a concept for a system is a key step toward creating the system's architecture. Most previous concept development approaches focus on the procedures for the conceptual design activity—the sequence of activities and tasks. Our work is motivated by the desire to elaborate in details the notional content of a system concept and to provide the means of encoding and analyzing it in a

As engineers retire from practice, they must transfer their expertise to new recruits. Typically, this is accomplished using decision‐support systems that communicate precise probabilities. However, Fuzzy‐Trace Theory (FTT) predicts that the most experts prefer to rely on “gist” representations of risk over “verbatim” representations. We conducted a survey of 41 NASA employees (whose mathematical abilities

We propose a Systems Modeling Language (SysML) extension, referred to as the “Human‐Agent Teaming Modeling Language,” and a companion method, referred to as “Human‐Agent Teaming Design Method,” which are useful in the design and specification of teams comprised of humans and artificial agents which interact within a system. The language and method support the analysis and design of human‐agent teams

Dynamic and real‐time adaptive configuration of Cyber‐Physical Systems (CPSs) results in increased complexity due to a variety of heterogeneous and interdependent variables and creates unique challenges. For example, (a) Emergent Behavior: How do we ensure that system constituents dynamically and adaptively collaborate to produce a consistent repeatable functionality while supporting the capability

Given that model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) captures the structure and behavior of an engineered system in an overarching system model, MBSE appears to be a promising approach to managing large infrastructure projects (LIPs). However, it is not apparent how to most appropriately organize the associated system model—and hence the infrastructure project itself. Furthermore, MBSE may today not be

Systems engineering and design (SE&D) researchers increasingly tackle questions at the intersection of technical and social aspects of complex systems design. Practical challenges of access, limited observation scope, and long timescales limit empirical study of SE&D phenomena. As a result, studies are typically conducted in model world settings abstracted from the real world, such as behavioral experiments

The concept of technological ecosystems has been increasingly applied across different domains but rarely in the area of capability development. This paper contributes to addressing this knowledge gap by demonstrating the potential value of applying the technological ecosystems perspective to support technology investment decisions. We present a practical step‐by‐step approach to show how this approach

In recent years, cyber‐physical systems (CPS) have been widely used in different problem domains. The hardware and software components in a CPS are deeply intertwined at various levels of abstraction under changing contexts to achieve the desired goals. One way to manage this complexity is through the use of modular architecture that enables portions of a CPS to be upgraded, replaced, or fixed in a

Increasingly complex systems of systems (SoS) have to be developed in ever shorter times‐to‐market at reduced costs and with high reliability. In addition, as the life cycle of such SoS frequently spans across several decades, customer expectations and market conditions will evolve. Systems engineering (SE)/model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) and configuration management (CM) need to be ever more

The technology readiness level (TRL) scale was developed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1970s as a standardized technology maturity assessment tool for use in complex system development. Today, TRL assessments are used to make multimillion‐dollar decisions at NASA and beyond, yet anecdotal evidence suggests that there are challenges associated with TRL use in practice

Addressing modern societal challenges often requires the consideration of sociotechnical systems. Sociotechnical systems consist of technological, organizational, and social systems interacting to achieve a goal. Developing effective approaches to modeling sociotechnical systems could enable policy makers to better understand the implications of policy options prior to implementation. Through past

Presented is a novel framework for interactive systems architecture definition at early design stages. It incorporates graph‐theoretic data structures, entity relationships, and algorithms that enable the systems architect to operate interactively and simultaneously in different domains. It explicitly captures the “zigzagging” of the functional reasoning process, including not only allocated, but also