Systems Engineering

How does the Institute of Astronautics perceive systems engineering? We would like to give you an overview of its activities in this area.

We want to start with typical problems you and we are faced time and again during our daily work and project work (s. Fig. 1). The focus of attention is the development process of a product or a system. We think that there are several approaches during the period from the first idea to placing the product out of service. We will only mention a few below.

High time pressure to launch a product in time is the reason why very often just after a first idea people start thinking about a specific solution without clearly defining the goals and derived requirements, very often also without developing and analysing different alternatives for solutions.

Fig. 1: Typical Problems in Industry

So very often during the development process of a product it is discovered that the customer may have a totally different idea of the product from what the engineers thought. This in turn leads to expensive modifications and extra expenditure during later project stages, and time delays are already foreseeable.

Everyday project work is easily converted into so-called fire fighting, i.e. reacting instead of acting.

Another important problem is the still very common sequential succession of development steps and so-called departmental thinking - which leads to island solutions, e.g. IT solutions tailor-made for partial processes, which are however only suboptimal for the overall system.

The experience and the knowledge is locked up in the individual brains, it is tied to individuals, thus for an organisation it is very difficult and costly to get access to the knowledge .

Fig. 2: Systems Thinking

Suboptimal solutions or not involving the system perspective may lead to fatal consequences (s. Fig. 2).

With reference to the last picture it becomes clear that in an organisation which has the common goal of implementing the requirements of the customer in an optimum way in order to develop inspiring products, we are all in the same boat.

Fig. 3: Basics of Systems Engineering

What does systems engineering mean?

According to the NASA definition and the standard EIA/IS632 systems engineering is "an interdisciplinary approach encompassing the entire technical effort to evolve and verify an integrated and lifecycle balanced set of system people, product, and process solutions that satisfy customer needs".

So the most important aspects of systems engineering are interdisciplinarity and integration of people, products and processes. These aspects are to be used to find a solution which is balanced throughout the whole life cycle.

And systems engineering is situated within this field of tension between people (organisation), products (including product goals) and processes. Although the Institute of Astronautics has been looking into topics of this field during the last 20 years, the work of the Institute has been focused mainly on processes.

Systems engineering can be described as the formalisable part of engineering - the system is composed of elements which have attributes or features. These elements interact by means of relations. Hierarchies may form, as an element as such can also be a system.

This quite easy description under consideration of a sensible delimitation with regard to a system environment, which has to be defined, makes it possible to comply with the basic requirement of systems engineering.

This requirement is deduced from the question of why we actually do systems engineering - because we want to understand and master complex systems in their entirety.

A complex system has of course a different meaning for different people - a complex system is for example characterised by a high division of labour of an organisation or a high degree of networking and interdisciplinarity.

This is the foundation for solving every problem of systems engineering. It is based on an approach model - the systems engineering problem solving cycle - where the goals are defined on the basis of a problem. With these goals in mind solution alternatives are developed, and models are built, which are then submitted to a comprehensive analysis and evaluation - finally a decision is made in order to find the best solution for this (partial) problem from the perspective of the overall system as well as the partial system or component.

Finally it is worth mentioning that also the creative individual is considered a part of a system - so the non formalisable part of engineering is elementary as well. Methodical science of systems engineering uses heuristics and problem-specific methods in order to be able to offer problem solutions.

Fig. 4: Focus at the LRT

The industrial use of this systems engineering philosophy started with the model MuSys, which depicts an industrial enterprise by means of the four elements target system, object system, process system, and action system (ZOPH). During the course of the years projects were carried out at the Institute in all these four areas, but the focus of activities of the Institute was on the fields of product and process. At the Institute of Astronautics e.g. methods and tools were developed to support integrated system development, test strategy planning, knowledge management, change management and configuration management. The Institute is also active in systems engineering on an international level within the framework of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), a syndicate for systems engineering. The German INCOSE branch, the Gesellschaft für Systems Engineering (GfSE) was basically founded by employees of the Institute.

Fig. 5: Current Examples of Projects

Figure 5 shows current examples of projects of the Institute in the field of systems engineering, which are described in the following.

SysTest

In the EU project SysTest six partner companies from five different countries are working together in the field of validation and verification.
The percentage of verification and validation cost of the development process amounts to about 30 to 40% - test planning however is usually not methodically supported.

Test are very often not carried out on the basis of comprehensive planning, starting with the requirements of the system to be developed. The consequences are that very often unnecessary subsequent work has to be done in late development stages, as well as budget overruns and insufficient product quality.

This is why in SysTest a generic test planning procedure has been defined, which methodically supports the user during the planning of the verification and validation process. Important disciplines such as requirement and risk management are included in this approach. The test planning procedure is supported by a software developed at the LRT. This software can be used to estimate the cost and duration of the verification and validation process as well as the risks involved.

This approach makes it possible to optimise the verification and validation process with regard to cost, duration and technical risk.

	Additional Information Systest
	Paper "Application Experiences of the VVT Process Modeling Procedure"
	Paper "VVT Strategy and Planning Procedure"

Rosetta Knowledge Management Video Approach (RKMVA)

The RKMVA project is about knowledge management.
The satellite Rosetta, launched into space in March, will reach a comet in the year 2014, and it will drop a lander. This lander is supposed to work there and register data for two more years.
Due to employee fluctuation and the fact that knowledge is closely linked to individual persons, there is a risk that perfect operation of all the instruments cannot be guaranteed when the satellite reaches its goal, especially when dealing with problematic situations. Many experts who participated in the development will not be available anymore at that time.

So the goal is to structurally save the knowledge and experience of these experts.

As a supplement to already existing means for information storage such as reports, drawings, handbooks, and models, the LRT developed the method of video-based interviews. On the basis of an exactly defined script clearly structured interviews are carried out with the experts. Every interview quickly leads to several hours of video material, so it is necessary to easily access the stored knowledge. This targeted access is done via a defined index with the help of a specially designed software.

	Additional Information RKMVA
	RKMVA Overview
	RKMVA Paper

BaiCES/Integrated Development Environment

The BaiCES project is a research cooperation to strengthen the aerospace industry location of Bavaria. The LRT has worked on different topics within the framework of this cooperation.

A very important topic was the development of innovative system development processes. The goal was to map recurrent events - like the development of solution alternatives, the analysis and evaluation of these alternatives, making decisions - in a comprehensive model.

A software developed at the LRT supports this method of comprehensive integration in the framework of an integrated development environment. Experts also integrate their subsystems or partial systems into an overall model. This instantly reveals disruptions such as modifications, and makes them visible to all participants. Development decisions are directly implemented, and the consequences for the overall system are instantly visible.

This overall system model can be analysed and optimised according to a clearly defined tool-aided process. This leads to an enormous reduction of development periods and costs.

	Additional Information Baices
	Presentation BaiCES
	Paper BaiCES
	Paper Design Centers
	Paper Space System Concept Center

Configuration Management

The topic of this area is the highly integrated electrical and electronic system (E/E) in a vehicle. If you consider the development of the number of electronic control units in a modern vehicle and the increased implementation of functionalities by means of electronics and software, it becomes clear that the importance of E/E will even further increase in automotive development. The complexity of the system will continue to increase also in the future.

A configuration is able to depict a vehicle according to a specific customer order, or it can only be a part of a specific development stage (e.g. components of a bus harness, partial systems, test carriers etc.). An E/E configuration depicts a defined number of objects at a particular time for a particular purpose (hardware, software, data, documentation, development tools).

Configuration management means that all people involved in the development process work at defined times on the basis of the same reference configuration. This is also called baselines.

Why is configuration management necessary?
Configurations are subject to permanent modifications. These modifications need to be carried out according to a defined process in order to be visible and comprehensible for all the people involved. This is particularly important when identifying causes of trouble.

Configuration management regulates procedures and responsibilities for planning, drawing up and modifying baselines. Within the project work concepts and methods to support the baseline management processes as well as change management were developed.

	Additional Information SE in General
	Overview Systems Engineering
	Presentation Methods for Verification and Validation Planning

	Semester und Diplomarbeiten
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With this tool it will be possible to test the suitability of a produkt for a productconfigurator ... > more Title: Entwicklung eines XML Exporters   Semester Thesis - Constructive - RT-IDP 2008-01 For my interdisciplinary project, a XML exporter for (v)Sys-ed was programmed, which offers the possibility to export models to an XML-file so that they can be imported into (U)CML-ed. In order to accomplish this properly, the first step was to define a common model which embodied the ideas and concepts of both tools. ... > more Title: ERIS Dissemination Strategy   Master Thesis - Theoretical - RT-DA 05-08 Galileo is the European participation to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). 27 Medium Earth Orbit satellites will provide a navigation and an integrity service for any user over the world as well as other various services such as Search and Rescue for example to specific clients. 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