MBSE delivers significant return on investment in evolutionary development of complex SoS

Abstract

The Submarine Warfare Federated Tactical Systems (SWFTS) is a rapidly evolving combat system of systems (SoS) product family. Managing the annual baseline updates requires processing thousands of baseline change requests, then coordinating and verifying their implementation. The complexity of this effort, which involves well over ten million source-lines-of-code (SLOC) as well as Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) and military-unique hardware, is compounded by being deployed in ten variants.After a feasibility study in 2010 the SWFTS systems engineering and integration program started a transition from traditional requirements database and documentcentric systems engineering (DCSE) to a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) process. At that time there was little solid evidence in the literature for a positive Return on Investment (ROI) for moving from DCSE to MBSE.Applying MBSE to this program has resulted in measurable monetary and operational benefits. We 1) summarize the DCSE to MBSE transition, 2) describe the accomplishments and observations to date, 3) define the metrics collected, and 4) quantify the achieved ROI. Background on the systems engineering and integration (SE&I) process and an apples-to-apples comparison of SE quality and efficiency are provided. The raw SE&I efficiencies of the DCSE and MBSE approaches are documented, along with conclusions showing that the MBSE approach delivers a positive ROI through higher quality SE products at significantly less cost-per-change, enables managing more baselines and SoS complexity using constant resources, and reduces the cost of the downstream integration effort.

Model Based HSI & Operational Process Simulation

“…The above FF model has contributed to the operational understanding of the FF operation. This contribution should be measured and compared to Return On Investment (ROI) assumptions [26], as in the referenced paper.…”

Model-Based System Engineering Adoption in the Vehicular Systems Domain

“…1) Reasons and targets: Mitchell et al [4], [5] have performed empirical case studies on the transitioning to MBSE in a system-of-systems product family organization. The primary purposes of the transition were to keep up with the increasing workload, increase automation in the systems engineering workflow, eliminate duplicate data, enhance manual quality assurance, enhance change impact analysis, achieve the automated generation of an interface description language, improve data integrity, and reduce the cost of quality assurance.…”

“…Douglass [3] suggests that adoption of MBSE is a challenging change process featuring four partly overlapping phasesassessment, planning, piloting/early adoption, and deployment, where the level of success in each phase depends strongly on the quality of the work that has been done in the previous phase. The empirical results of a study by Rogers and Mitchell suggest that the investment cost for transitioning to MBSE could be considerable and that the adopting organization might have to display patience regarding the ROI [4].…”

Complexity identification in major infrastructure project information systems using graph theory

“…MBSE is the formalised abstraction of data from the SE process into a model centric view that assists in the rigor of the key elements of requirements, architecture, design, analysis, trade-offs and validation and verifications of a given system throughout the lifecycle of a product or system 39 . Whilst several studies have shown the ability to gain value from MBSE application 46 , there has been cross sectional analysis that suggest that evidence supporting MBSE value is inconclusive 47 . In this way MBSE has a similar issue in showing value to that of BIM and health and safety interventions.…”