Domain #5: Systems engineering

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Managing the system design cycle

Systems engineering is an approach that relies on methods, tools and standards to formalise and control the design chain. It starts from the very definition of needs, and realizes the implementation of the system, including its validation.
It consists of building and operating a system according to the needs and requirements expressed by the various stakeholders (designers, users, authorities, maintainers, etc.) throughout its life cycle. In this context, the complexity of the system is not only related to the different technological dimensions of the system. It must also consider the organisational aspects of the stakeholders.

Challenges

There are multiple challenges of systems engineering: ensuring digital continuity in extended organisations, managing consistency in the design of large systems, analysing the impact and anticipating the control of architectures to guarantee costs, and finally controlling the safety of people and the system throughout the design cycle.

Positioning of the institute

Since its creation and due to its focus on the engineering of complex systems, IRT SystemX has identified systems engineering as a research priority area. The institute has therefore acquired a large volume of skills in this field to provide state-of-the-art solutions and to carry out more upstream research work, in particular on collaborative engineering, system interoperability and requirements engineering.

Roadmap

Scientific and technological challenges	Related research fields
Collaborative engineering	• Reconciliation of views • Process orchestration • Improvement of socio-technical factors • Coupling of engineering (bi-engineering)
Interoperability of systems and integration	• Technical, semantic and syntactic interoperability • Dynamic interoperability (co-simulation, continuous heterogeneous simulation, event-driven, etc.)
Efficient requirements engineering for the MBSE (Model-Based System Engineering)	• Eliciting traceability • Consistency between requirements and models • Impact of system specification methods using AI techniques on system engineering – Improving the quality of requirements with AI techniques