What are real „collaborative” tools in the system engineering process of complex systems? – Throughout today’s product development process there are a lot of typical islands of data, e.g. DOORS for Requirement Management, Visio for the Architecture drawings, Simulink for the analysis, FaultTree+ for Safety-/Risk-assessment, … and MS-Office to glue it all together. Independent of the benefit of such programs, if it comes to handover of produced results to the next team, there is usually a lot of effort required to read, understand and re-present (in the proper meaning of the word) them for the individual next analysis or procedure. Manual conversion costs time and quality.
How can the process of system-, safety-, software- and also maintenance-engineering be streamlined by a really integrated solution? Which application cases exist and what are practical experiences? – This question was the motivation for a discussion started in march 2015 in several groups in LinkedIn, see below.
Such a platform should – maybe in individual views – ideally support the whole process from the bid phase over development, integration, testing down to operation and maintenance.
Here are some criteria that come to mind:
- central repository for easy knowledge storage and retrieval (for textual, tabular, graphical, binary data);
- allowing intuitive graphical definition of architectures over all levels and of hierarchical interfaces/ports;
- support for fault behavior description and analyses (e.g. FTA, FMEA, Diagnostics, …);
- allow definition of modular reusable building-blocks of various system-entities (libraries);
- capabilities/connections to quantitative/modelbased system analysis/simulation;
- providing version management/baselining;
- generation of tailored views and reports;
- good support for V&V and traceability;
- open interfaces to established tools;
- multi-user (of course) incl. definition of roles;
- web-based or standalone;
- applicable also for training purpose/maintenance instructions;
- …
The discussion has been started in the following LinkedIn-groups, bringing already a lot of very interesting comments:
- System of Systems Engineering (many comments)
- System Safety Professionals
- Service Lifecycle Management (SLM)
- Simulation Driven Engineering
Feel invited to these forums to learn about some very exciting tool and platform developments going on or to post your own ideas and thoughts.