Interface Management in Concurrent Engineering Facilities for Systems and Service Systems Engineering: A Model-based Approach

Abstract

Concurrent engineering facilities (CEFs) are successfully used in the aeropsace sector to design systems and services that that fulfill the requirements. Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) enables the effective (i.e., unambiguous) communication in the collaborative activities within concurrent engineering and service systems engineering facilities. The advantages obtained by the MBSE approach can be further scaled up by an innovative approach that take into explicit account the representation of the inter-systems aspects, i.e., those aspects, namely interfacs, that stay in between the system, its sub-systems and external entities (other systems and organizations). Such an approach, briefly denoted as a Model-based Interface Engineering (MBIE), brings several benefits to the CEF activities. This paper illustrates the integration of the Interface Communication Modelling Language (ICML) into the existing MBSE methods for the CEF software framework VirSat, by identifying the business needs driving the use of MBIE approaches and showing example application scenarios.