Nuclear
Industries that require a high level of safety integrity within their equipment need to be specified, modelled and designed according to International Standards. There must be clear evidence that requirements conform to the Nuclear Regulations issued by the regulatory bodies and other relevant national authorities. And that these requirements are promulgated into the equipment designs and into implementation.
With model-based system engineering activities then documents and specifications are no longer are used to transfer knowledge between isolated teams. Instead, engineers create requirements and simultaneously interacting with sophisticated domain models. Seamlessly passing from requirements through to designs.
This can have a significant reduction in the degradation of knowledge between the teams. And is a collaborative, agile approach to managing complexity across the product lifecycle.
Industrial
As the Industrial sector embraces digital technologies such as cloud hosting, Industrial IoT, robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Twins, the need for integration becomes paramount. It is the sharing of the vast amount of data, coupled with the holistic integration of systems, tools and processes which will enable organizations to fully realize the potential of the Industrial 4.0 revolution.
Collecting real time data will ensure that data is only ever submitted once and that the end to end supply chain visibility is available at every management level, optimizing feedback and progress reporting.
Aerospace
Equipment sent into space must work first time – there is little scope for software/hardware tweaking. Verification and validation of satellite systems before launch requires diligence and evidence that the test results, test cases have been captured correctly. More importantly, traceability should also show what is still to be done.
The European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) frequently publishes standards, to which contractors working for ESA must adhere to.
The System Engineering standards (E-10 series) include standards on Technical Requirements Specification, Verification and Testing which are of particular importance for the management of requirements in space systems.
The space engineering standards are also available as DOORS modules.
Defence
Modern war fighting demands complex systems and complex systems demand rigorous specification and validation.
At the platform level – what contribution does the asset make to overall Military Capability? The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) Architecture Framework (MODAF) was initially released in August 2005 to support such defence planning and change management activities.
Interoperability at mission level can be developed into a sequence diagram and from that the system interactions can be determined.
Decomposition of the systems using Systems of Systems Engineering, or alternative structured analytical approaches such as Model-based System Engineering (MBSE), will support their specification, analysis, design, verification and validation.
Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE) methodology is heavily used in U.S. Department of Defense applications, but is increasingly being applied to non-defence related problems such as architectural design of problems in aerospace and automotive transportation, healthcare and global communication networks.
Rail
Innovative use of digital twins that bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds is now becoming the way forward for the industry. BIM provides a deeper understanding of the impact of design and design changes across all systems and throughout the product lifecycle. But adoption of BIM is not the full answer.
The close correlation between what has been built, what has been designed and what has been specified (bottom up approach) needs now to be tested fully. Progressive Assurance, in real time, of the requirements is slowly being adopted in the Rail industry. This results in a full and complete picture of the state of verification and validation at each stage of the project.
It also needs the full integration of the hazards and their mitigations with the requirements so that all safety requirements are identified and can be traced to a Hazard.
Our safety assurance model is based on first principles:
Automotive
There are 2 main international standards that apply for automotive software systems.
ISO 26262:2018 “Road vehicles – Functional safety”, is an international standard intended to be applied to safety-related electrical and/or electronic systems and which are installed in series production passenger cars.
Automotive SPICE (ASPICE) is a process maturity framework for improving and evaluating the maturity of processes to develop embedded systems in the automotive industry. It leans heavily on ISO/IEC 33020:2015 which defines the process measurement framework that supports the assessment of process capability, in accordance with the requirements of ISO/IEC 33003.
Starting out can be a challenge. As with all maturity models you need to produce new life cycle processes, train and encourage your staff to follow them and, most importantly, you need to provide evidence that they are being followed. We can support an organisation with all these issues. In our experience most companies are doing the job and doing it well; its just the process are out of date to what is actually happening.
And if you are an organisation that is looking for process improvement then we can support you in this as well. Evaluating, auditing and reviewing your existing processes in order to establish where they are gaps and where things can be improved. This by necessity, draws on our experience because what works well in one company does not always achieve the same results in another.