Managing the Embedded Systems Development Process with Product LifeCycle Management

Abstract

In industries like Transportation, Aerospace and Defense or High-Tech, the effective development of complex systems implies mastering multiple disciplines and processes: project, people and data governance processes, requirements based and model based system engineering approaches, System Architecture Design with trade-off analysis, cross-disciplinary detailed design, integration, test, validation and verification methods. These processes are interrelated; managing complexity calls for tight collaboration between development stakeholders and demand very high data consistency between system compositional elements, at all levels. Organizations face significant challenges to maintaining coherency, consistency and relevance of this information across domains as well as capitalizing on it from one complex project to another; Failure to do so though is often resulting in costly reworks, product recalls, worse: attractiveness and competitiveness drops and jeopardized growth. In today’s highly competitive, fast changing and demanding markets, saving investment time, resources and money for the creation of higher market appeal products is vital. This presentation will outline a vision for an open and integrated System Engineering platform, that leverages the richness and efficiency of online communities, the effective composition and reuse of multi-disciplinarily assets and the value of virtual user experiences, to facilitate new smart E/E systems development. Architecture of Systems is therefore just a unified and homogenous framework that allows to see all these different architectural traditions as instances of a same and unique “abstract” discipline. This system-oriented discipline clearly emerges nowadays from the convergence that one can presently observe at the level of the scientific and methodological foundations of many architectural practices such as: Enterprise Architecture that allows to design integrated enterprise information systems, Software Architecture which is at the basis of all software design processes, Systems Architecture that is key for designing efficiently complex industrial systems, resulting from software-hardware integration, Organization and Project Architecture which underlies agile development methods. Architecture of Systems is therefore just a unified and homogenous framework that allows seeing all these different architectural traditions as instances of a same and unique “abstract” discipline, which underlies agile development methods.