System Evolution Barriers and How to Overcome Them!

Creating complex systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore a strategy often chosen by companies is to evolve existing systems. Yet evolving a system is also complicated. Complex systems are usually the result of multidisciplinary teams, therefore it is essential to understand barriers those teams face when evolving a system.\ud From the research carried at Philips Healthcare MRI, we have identified that main evolution barriers employees face are; managing system complexity,communication across disciplines and departments, finding the necessary system information, lack of system overview, and ineffective knowledge sharing. Those barriers were identified as the root cause of many development problems and bad decisions.\ud To overcome those barriers, and therefore enhance the evolution process, effective reuse of knowledge is essential. This knowledge must be presented in a fashion that can be understood by a broad set of stakeholders. In this paper system evolution barriers and a method to effectively deal with them, based on the creation of A3 Architecture Overviews, is presented

TRIZ for systems architecting

TRIZ has gained interest over the past decades, as among others expressed by this conference. It is widely used and acknowledged for dealing with technical issues on component level. However, decisions on system level have a much greater impact than those on component level. Thus it is worthwhile to investigate applying TRIZ early in the design process. The article explores the benefits of and possibilities for applying TRIZ in the architecting phase. For this, system architecting is treated in short. An architecting approach presented earlier will be treated and elaborated upon. This approach connects the customer's key drivers with functions to be performed. This approach provides leads for integrating TRIZ in the system architecting phase. These will be discussed in detail as the main subject of the paper. Examples, conclusions and ideas for future work complete the paper

The engineers’ innovation toolkit

Most engineers nowadays receive a mono-disciplinary education: Mechanical engineering, Electrical engineering etc. Contradictory, the products they have to design are ever more multidisciplinary and integrated. This requires a different mindset. This paper discusses four tools that fit in the engineers’ toolkit to approach these multidisciplinary problems: TRIZ, Systematic Inventive Thinking, Quality Function Deployment and FunKey Architecting. The tools are discussed and rated on four scales: difficulty of problems, complexity of problems, design phase and learning effort. From the characterization a set of heuristics is derived that help in choosing the appropriate tool from the toolkit.\ud \ud It is concluded that the four tools largely complement each other and should therefore be part of every engineer's toolkit.\u

Communication in multidisciplinary systems architecting

Systems architecting is multidisciplinary by nature. It is interesting to note that the methods and tools that are developed and presented in literature are mostly based on one or a very limited number of formalisms. This means that an often large part of the stakeholders involved in the architecting process are hindered in the understanding of, and contributing to the architecture.\ud The paper investigates the architecting process and complexity in combination with knowledge and knowledge creation. Communication is identified as essential. It thus follows that tools that base on one formalism limit this communication in a multidisciplinary setting. Based on experiences from architects, literature and the author, ingredients for successful multidisciplinary architecting are listed, and directions for future research in complex systems architecting are given, based on these ingredients

Probabilistic thinking to support early evaluation of system quality: through requirement analysis

This paper focuses on coping with system quality in the early phases of design where there is lack of knowledge about a system, its functions or its architect. The paper encourages knowledge based evaluation of system quality and promotes probabilistic thinking. It states that probabilistic thinking facilitates communication between a system designer and other design stakeholders or specialists. It accommodates tolerance and flexibility in sharing opinions and embraces uncertain information. This uncertain information, however, is to be processed and combined. This study offers a basic framework to collect, process and combine uncertain information based on the probability theory. Our purpose is to offer a graphical tool used by a system designer, systems engineer or system architect for collecting information under uncertainty. An example shows the application of this method through a case study

Introducing systems engineering to industrial design engineering students with hands-on experience

The article presents an innovative educational project to introduce systems engineering to third year students in industrial design engineering at the University of Twente. In a short period the students are confronted with new technology, namely sensors and actuators. They have to apply this technology in a complex situation, the design of a home climate system or an intelligent automobile. They work in large groups without tutor. In parallel a basic course on systems engineering is given to provide the students with tools for handling this situation. The aim is that students are forced to apply the systems engineering tools in a concrete situation, thus directly experiencing the benefits. The project is implemented and the article describes the context, the goals, the setup, and the experiences of both teachers and students. The article concludes with an evaluation of the first and second year it has been executed

Interactive A3 Architecture Overviews ☆: Intuitive Functionalities for Effective Communication

The A3 Architecture Overviews introduced earlier provide a powerful communication medium in systems engineering and architecting. Intended originally for reverse architecting, they are now also applied for designing system architectures and for systems of systems. With the current development in user interaction and touch controlled interfaces, a new means of communicating in systems engineering opens: Interactive A3 Architecture Overviews. This paper gives an overview of the state of the art of A3 Architecture Overviews before we present an investigation into interactive possibilities and an evaluation of a demonstration using a proof of concept. The results of the demonstration with several experts are listed. The main conclusion is that Interactive A3 Architecture Overviews can convey more information, without impeding usability. We end with a proposal for further developmen