Systems engineering (SE) provides methods and tools to model and design complex systems of systems (SoS). By identifying and monitoring the critical dependencies and interactions among system components throughout the design lifecycle, SE provides the means to communicate critical information about those systems across a large and diverse set of stakeholders spanning multiple functional and non-functional domains.
As systems become more complex and interconnected, government and industry have turned to digital methods (e.g., Model-Based Systems Engineering) to capture a digital baseline of system architecture, requirements, and more; however, this focus on baseline definition has created a digital communication gap. External stakeholders, who are often beholden to regulatory requirements with extensive certification and authorization requirements, often don’t have access to digital system models and require documents to review. This culture gap creates a need to recreate content from the model and in documents, often with the greatest impact being on SE Technical Review (SETR) events, where this technical content is the focus.
By using the system model as the objective evidence and source of truth for the technical review, stakeholders have access to the latest design of the model in its entirety, and can explore and deep dive into content that would be difficult access in a traditional documentation based review. This also helps during the review when stakeholder inquire about information that may not have originally been used to answer review criteria but still exists in the model, and it is easy to find. Model traceability and simulations allows stakeholders to understand how elements interact with each other, satisfy requirements, and meet key performance metrics. Using model metrics can show gaps in coverage and progress toward completeness over time of the system of systems.
In this presentation, Deloitte will spotlight our approach to performing model-based SETR events (Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and Critical Design Review (CDR)). Model-based SETR events enable a program to balance the development of technical content in the model with the communication and socialization of that content in formats that are familiar to stakeholders who would review the technical baseline. Deloitte’s approach emphasizes identification of (and traceability among) requirements, physical and functional architecture, test cases, risks, and the project schedule in our integrated SoS model, using SysML and the Unified Architecture Framework (UAF). Using this approach, Deloitte progressed from concept to PDR for defense clients in under 6 months; and then to CDR in under 12 months. This presentation will focus on our approach to developing the technical review content, packaging the content for review, and then conduct of the technical review events.