This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

Engineering organizations are experiencing a rapid increase in product complexity, driven by the need to continually innovate to survive and based on the exponential increase in the use of sophisticated electronics and software content in virtually every industry. The traditional “stage gate” methods of product development with separated “silos” of data, models and information across the engineering domains of mechanical, electrical/electronics, software, controls, chemical formulations, etc. is no longer adequate to define, optimize, assess and validate the performance of today’s complex systems… and systems of systems. Collaborating virtually with globally distributed product development groups as well as suppliers and teaming partners is also becoming an increasingly critical aspect of the product development lifecycle for most industries. The risk of “business as usual” is now becoming well understood across all industries based on companies that have recently experienced systems level failures resulting in costly product recalls, warranty claims, and non-compliance with government regulations.

These trends and other forces related to the rapid digitalization of all business processes and the movement towards Industry 4.0 have led to an increased focus on defining and adopting model-based processes and technologies for developing and maintaining complex systems, commonly referred to as Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).

Concurrent with the movement towards model-based approaches in the various engineering domains, industry has recognized and begun to address the need for more robust systems modeling languages and data interoperability standards. While systems modeling languages such as UML, MARTE and AADL and data interoperability standards such as the STEP AP2xx series have existed for some time now, the adoption rate has been limited to certain specialized domains and standards have had far less business impact than desired in the engineering domain as a whole. While still in the early stages of maturity, significant progress has been achieved just within the past several years based on emerging systems modeling languages such as OMG SysML and Modelica and data interoperability standards such as XML/XMI, FMI/FMU, ReqIF, MoSSEC and OSLC.

In this session, we will provide an overview of the major engineering standards efforts underway and discuss the status of the most promising systems modeling languages and data interoperability standards, those that have the greatest potential to enable the collaboration required across engineering disciplines and support the achievement of the “digital thread” vision across the entire product development lifecycle.