According to the United States Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD R&E), “Digital engineering is an integrated digital approach using authoritative sources of system data and models as a continuum throughout the development and life of a system. Digital engineering updates traditional systems engineering practices to take advantage of computational technology, modeling, analytics, and data sciences.”
From the very beginning, there was a recognition of the impact Digital Engineering (DE) will have on Systems Engineering (SE). For the past two years, the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) and OUSD R&E have conducted research into the causal factors that are delaying the full implementation of DE into DOD SE practices and workflows. The research team conducted three formal workshops including an INCOSE Strategy Session with government, industry and academia to gain insights. In addition, the team had a number of individual discussions with experts and program offices led by the sponsor. These activities generated a number of statements that informed a more comprehensive set of SE Modernization pain points from various participant and ongoing implementation strategies maturing at the program and Service level. The resulting integration framework organizes these into an Ishikawa (fishbone) diagram. The goal of the Systems Engineering Modernization effort is to build “Seamless and efficient digital flows from data to decision artifacts and from decision artifacts back to data.” The pain points led to development of a set of roadmaps for SE Modernization in the DoD engineering and acquisition processes. These roadmaps have been generalized to the larger SE community and will be presented in this talk, including ontologies and semantic integration for pervasive data and model driven program management and engineering process integration, improved collaboration around digital artifacts, reference implementations and common patterns for DE ecosystems, managing a fully digital and agile
SE lifecycle, and building workforce and culture. The presentation will summarize these roadmaps and offer insight on how digital SE might drive the future of SE.