A novel "resilience viewpoint" to aid in engineering resilience in systems of systems (SoS)

Designing evolutionary systems to meet stakeholder expectations on safety, reliability and overall resilience is of great importance in an age of interconnectivity and high dependency systems. With incidents and disruptions becoming more frequent in recent years, the requirement for systems to demonstrate high levels of resilience given the economic, political and temporal dimensions of complexity, resilience is of great significance today. Systemic resilience is of high importance at the global level. Therefore, the role of the system engineer and architect is becoming more demanding due to the need to consider requirements from a broader range of stakeholders and to implement them into early conceptual designs. The early modeling process of all systems is common ground for most engineering projects, creating an architecture to both understand a system and to design future iterations by applying model-based processes has become the norm. With the concept of systems-ofsystems (SoS) becoming common language across multiple engineering domains, model-based systems engineering techniques are evolving hand-in-hand to provide a paradigm to better analyse current and future SoS. The intrinsic characteristics of the constituent systems that make up the SoS make the challenge of designing and maintaining the reliability and resilience of a systems extremely difficult. This paper proposes a novel viewpoint, within an architecture framework (based around DoDAF, MoDAF and UPDM) to aid systems architects explore and design resilient SoS. This is known as the Resilience Viewpoint. Much of the research in the area is focussed on critical infrastructure (CI), looking at telecommunication networks, electric grid, supply networks etc, and little has been done on a generalizable tool for SoS architecture analysis, especially using existing modeling languages. Here, the application of the ‘Resilience Viewpoint’ is demonstrated using a case study from an integrated water supply system of systems, to portray its potential analytical capabilities

A student perspective into ESA Academy Space Systems Engineering Training Course

The ESA Academy’s Space Systems Engineering Training Course is a unique educational opportunity offered by the European Space Agency’s Education Office. It allows Bachelor, Master and PhD students to learn about the fascinating world of Systems Engineering and its applications within the space sector, while bringing this captivating framework of challenges and satisfaction to life for the participants of the Training Course. During this course, the whole life-cycle of a space project is explored from a System Engineering viewpoint, and students can learn about the challenges of Space Systems Engineering. Moreover, the Systems Engineering process is explored in detail [1]. Taught by ESA experts, the Training Course is delivered through formal lectures, with a heavy emphasis on the interaction with the students. During the course, students take part in group exercises aimed at putting the theory learnt into practice. This paper purposes at giving an overview of the training course, as it took place online on the 12th -20th of July 2021, and at addressing the benefits of the Author’s participation into the Training Course for his studies and future space caree

Consciousness, Meaning and the Future Phenomenology

Phenomenological states are generally considered sources of intrinsic motivation for autonomous biological agents. In this paper we will address the issue of exploiting these states for robust goal-directed systems. We will provide an analysis of consciousness in terms of a precise definition of how an agent “understands” the informational flows entering the agent. This model of consciousness and understanding is based in the analysis and evaluation of phenomenological states along potential trajectories in the phase space of the agents. This implies that a possible strategy to follow in order to build autonomous but useful systems is to embed them with the particular, ad-hoc phenomenology that captures the requirements that define the system usefulness from a requirements-strict engineering viewpoint

Multiple viewpoint modelling framework enabling integrated product-process design

Nowadays, companies have to cope with numerous constraints at organisational and technical levels in order to improve their competitiveness edges such as productivity, efficiency, and flexibility. Integrated product-process design becomes more and more complex to manage because of increasingly customized products related to various stakeholders and concerns geographically distributed. It is still represents a huge challenge, especially in the early phases of product development process. In such a context, the management of information within integrated product-process design highlights needs in a consistent engineering model that enables product lifecycle management (PLM) integration. The paper presents a novel multiple viewpoint framework called multiple viewpoint assembly oriented, considering product design and assembly process domains in the broader context of concurrent engineering and PLM. The proposed framework describes the consistency, the propagation of information change, and mechanisms of views generation among the product lifecycle stages in order to support assembly oriented design philosophy. A new modelling language called System Modeling Language is used to describe the proposed model from a systems engineering point of view. The implementation of the model in a Web-service called PEGASUS as an application for PLM systems is describe

New Architectural Viewpoint for Enhancing Society’s Resilience for Multiple Risks Including Emerging COVID-19

The spread of COVID-19 all over the world since the beginning of the year 2020 requires a re-thinking of the meaning of the term “resilience” in the field of architecture and architectural engineering. Resilience from the viewpoint of architecture and architectural engineering has been investigated primarily in terms of conventional natural disaster risks (see, for example, Bruneau et al., 2003; Cimellaro et al., 2010;Architectural Institute of Japan [AIJ], 2020a). However, COVID-19 reminds us of the need to investigate resilience also in terms of infection risks. The places where people become infected are principally within buildings and transportation systems. Especially in buildings, three factors considered to be main risks for infection (closed spaces without ventilation, dense gatherings, close connection) often occur. For this reason, the role of architecture and architectural engineering is essential from the viewpoint of reducing the risk of infection, using versatile knowledge and technologies from the fields of architectural and regional planning. Following the appearance of COVID-19, architectural designers and engineers have an important mandate to think about the role of buildings and their related fields

Requirements elicitation through viewpoint control in a natural language environment

While requirements engineering is about building a conceptual model of part of reality, requirements validation involves assessing the model for correctness, completeness, and consistency. Viewpoint resolution is the process of comparing different views of a given situation and reconciling different opinions. In his doctoral dissertation Leite [72] proposes viewpoint resolution as a means for early validation of requirements of large systems. Leite concentrates on the representation of two different views using a special language, and the identification of their syntactic differences. His method relies heavily on redundancy: two viewpoints (systems analysts) should consider the same topic, use the same vocabulary, and use the same rule-based language which constrains how the rules should be expressed. The quality of discrepancies that can be detected using his method depends on the quality of the viewpoints. The hypothesis of this thesis is that, independently of the quality of the viewpoints, the number of viewpoints, the language, and the domain, it is possible to detect better quality discrepancies and to point out problems earlier than Leite's method allows. In the first part of this study, viewpoint-oriented requirements engineering methods are classified into categories based on the kind of multiplicity the methods address: multiple human agents, multiple specification processes, or multiple representation schemes. The classification provides a framework for the comparison and the evaluation of viewpoint-based methods. The study then focuses on the critical evaluation of Leite's method both analytically and experimentally. Counter examples were designed to identify the situations the method cannot handle. The second part of the work concentrates on the development of a method for the very early validation of requirements that improves on Leite's method and pushes the boundaries of the validation process upstream towards fact-finding, and downstream towards conflicts resolution. The Viewpoint Control Method draws its principles from the fields of uncertainty management and natural language engineering. The basic principle of the method is that, in order to make sense of a domain one must learn about the information sources and create models of their behaviour. These models are used to assess pieces of information, in natural language, received from the sources and to resolve conflicts between them. The models are then reassessed in the light of feedback from the results of the process of information evaluation and conflict resolution. Among the implications of this approach is the very early detection of problems, and the treatment of conflict resolution as an explicit and an integral part of the requirements engineering process. The method is designed to operate within a large environment called LOLITA that supports relevant aspects of natural language engineering. In the third part of the study the Viewpoint Control Method is applied and experimentally evaluated, using examples and practical case studies. Comparing the proposed approach to Leite's shows that the Viewpoint Control Method is of wider scope, is able to detect problems earlier, and is able to point out better quality problems. The conclusions of the investigation support the view that underlines the naivety of assuming competence or objectivity of each source of information

Exergy Inefficiency: An Indicator for Sustainable Development Analysis

The present days can be considered a crossroad in the history of our world because the economic, social, and environmental needs do not agree one another. The result is the present socio-economic difficulties, from which it seems very difficult to escape. A new viewpoint must be introduced, but it cannot be based on the usual economic indicators. So, a new viewpoint and a new related approach are required. In this paper we suggest three new indicators based on an engineering approach of irreversibility. They allow us to evaluate both the technological level and the environmental impact of the production processes and the socio-economic conditions of the countries. Indeed, they are based on the exergy analysis and on the irreversible thermodynamic approach, in order to evaluate the inefficiency both of the process and of the production systems, and the related consequences. Three applications are summarized in order to highlight the possible interest from different scientists and researchers in engineering, economy, etc, in order to develop sustainable approaches and policies for decision makers. Keywords: Bioeconomics, Entropy, Exergy, Irreversibility, Sustainability, Thermoeconomic