In today’s world, few systems remain cleanly within their scoped boundaries; most interact with other systems as a communication network, GPS, or an external power supply. Current methods of modeling Systems of Systems (SoS) struggle with limitations of language and diagram-based representations on top of the challenges of scale and scope. ARCADIA provides an alternative approach with a robust way to capture known and to-be-defined interfaces/integrations while using representations that facilitate cross-discipline collaboration, systems models that can be differentially decomposed based on the domain, and bidirectional sharing subsets of models with suppliers, partners, and even customers.
The ARCADIA methodology offers a way to avoid the “language barrier” because it emerged from work by a top-ten aerospace company who was looking for a systematic approach to support a diversity of product and system types, facilitate cross-domain collaboration, and be effective for projects that start at different points in the system/product lifecycle. Since its release as open-source, over 400 organizations have or are using it, and that community helped inspire the creation of an ISO standard, 24641 (in-work).
We will discuss the challenges of SoS modeling, explore doing recursive modeling (addressed in INCOSE SEBOK), and show several practical examples of its application. Demonstration via ARCADIA-supporting tool as well as interactive activity and discussion will provide insights into issues of composing new systems from pre-existing constituents and of extending an existing product with new system interactions and capabilities.
Note: ARCADIA is an open-source methodology managed under the Eclipse Foundation (www.eclipse.org/capella/arcadia.html).