Title: Systems Engineer, Boeing

First Name / Prenom: Robert

Last Name / Surname: Malone

Conference Sponsor: Boeing

Professional Affiliation: Boeing

Robert Malone,

Bob Malone is a systems engineer at the Boeing Company. He has spent his entire thirty-six year career in aerospace engineering and has specialized in systems engineering for the past twenty-six years. He has held positions in aircraft maintenance operations, aviation security system integration, human factors, reliability, maintainability and testability. His current focus is developing computer-based tools and processes supporting systems engineering, large scale system integration, and system integration modeling. He holds a BEng, Mechanical from the Royal Military College of Canada and an MS, Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech.

Email: [email protected] Web page: boeing.com

Each new aerospace product and derivative at Boeing incorporates increased systems integration that imposes, amongst others, significant interface management challenges. Centralized computing, utilizing Integrated Modular Architectures (IMA) (Ethernet), is now standard for Boeing commercial airplanes. IMA networks are intricate; what were once peer-to-peer signal transfers may now require 5-10 node traversals, involving routing and multiple protocol conversions along the source to sink path. End-to-end timing, latency, etc., requirements of the sink require division into budgets for each node, and subsequent aggregation of the actual values along the path to ultimately ensure requirement compliance. These interface management challenges are exacerbated by the fact that Boeing commercial airplane digital networks are generally produced by as many as 30 globally dispersed suppliers. Interface management cannot, therefore, be accomplished simply within Boeing. Having Boeing and its suppliers collaborate within a single, integrated Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) environment greatly facilitates the required coordination and interface management effort.

Although MBSE has proven highly valuable at Boeing, the state of the art of modeling practices, education, training, and tool suite offerings impedes the achievement of its full potential. In the area of model lifecycle management specifically, the concepts of: establishing configuration boundaries within models containing integrated requirements, functional, logical (design synthesis), etc. architectures, at various levels of architecture; controlling and managing change within these boundaries; and, establishing configuration baselines are not apparent. Even within a modeling environment, baseline part, component and system specifications need to be produced for suppliers. The ability to reuse model data by making them available as feature options to be incorporated as synchronized instantiations, either as redundant components within a product, or shared components across products, appears to be neither mature as a modeling concept or robust as modeling implementation. MBSE tool suites do not appear to elegantly support the necessary context switching between the product line views required by the architect and the individual product views required by the designer. Finally, data sharing between modeling environments is time consuming and expensive, due to the requirement to map disparate data models resulting from lack of modeling standards.

Culturally, a more sophisticated approach to MBSE within the systems engineering community is warranted in order to to mature these and other MBSE concepts and distill them into standard practice to advance the state of the art. Architecting and specifying useful MBSE tool suites is a distinct skillset, and should be embedded into systems engineering education and training to aid the elaboration of these concepts. Once modeling concepts have been developed and matured, the community should also coalesce around modeling and data exchange standards that form the basis of standard modeling processes and tool suite specifications.