In Stay Sharp Episode 92, Unpacking Digital Twins Series: MBSE, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant tackle another topic in their series on digital twins, thanks to their guest, David Long. David, a director, coach, and past president of INCOSE, the International Council on Systems Engineering, is also an expert in model-based systems engineering (MBSE). In this first of two parts, David helps Juliann and Jonathan dig into how MBSE relates to, fits into, and works with the digital twin concept
MBSE Is Becoming More Critical
David begins by characterizing MBSE as simply a way to collect and visualize how systems come together or how various models, components, and concepts interconnect. While people used to keep that knowledge in their heads or on paper documents, now we can create large knowledge maps—aka, databases—to help us visualize them in multiple ways, run computations on them, and more. Jonathan says, “It’s not that we never had models, it’s just they were implicit. Now they’re explicit in technology. We can use them.”
David agrees, adding, “Model-based systems engineering is about an approach that gets all that knowledge out in a more actionable way to handle both what I call the descriptive architecture, but then also at a system or system-of-systems level, a rudimentary performance architecture.” MBSE is particularly useful now because what we’re trying to build is becoming increasingly complex—with bigger systems, more teams, multiple disciplines, and multiple organizations. All of that means we have to become better at capturing and communicating our concepts, and we need greater clarity and scope for teams engineering the systems. MBSE helps us with both.
MBSE is involved at the front end of the digital twin effort. It’s most useful, David says, “Trying to translate from the customer need and concept into a high-level architecture that enables us to bring our specialty knowledge and engineer these new capabilities. Systems engineering remains involved through life. But our primary contribution is driving that architecture with the subject matter experts.” That makes MBSE most likely to play a role in a virtual twin—a digital representation of something that will eventually get a physical representation—rather than a higher-fidelity digital surrogate, digital shadow, or digital twin, which emerge later in a product’s lifecycle. MBSE is “an enabler on the engineering journey as opposed to being something that lives in the operational space, where surrogate shadow and digital twin really do live through life,” per David.
MBSE Is Connective Tissue
One critical aspect of MBSE is that it was never meant to be its own silo or to produce its own product. It’s meant to tie things together, to enable other expertise to come together. Jonathan says, “It fits in architecture, it fits in tying things together, but don’t think about it as plugging any specific hole or gap in the design and definition.” David adds, “At an MBSE level, we need to recognize where our role is, and that is to set the governing architecture to a level of fidelity that enables the various subject matter experts.”
MBSE can also make contributions well beyond the product level, such as connecting the organization and the enterprise. “To a systems engineer, everything is a system,” David admits. “The product that we build, the digital factory, the factory that builds it, the enterprise that engineers and supports it. All of those are systems from the right perspective, and therefore, if your product has an architecture, if your factory has an architecture, doesn’t your enterprise also have an architecture? Yes, it’s called an enterprise architecture. Can it be engineered? Yes, it can be systems engineered.” The only difference between MBSE for products or enterprise is the implementation technology: electromechanical and sensors versus human, process, and policy.
David makes the point that MBSE should be used beyond the product. “Conway’s Law says, loosely, the systems we build are reflections of the organizations that build them,” he says. “The organizations that are leading in the field of digital twin and digital engineering are often doing so because they have engineered their factory and their enterprise before they’ve engineered their product.” As Jonathan points out, a connection exists between systems of organizations, people, enterprises, and products. We can’t ignore the idea that our organizational characteristics could therefore manifest in our products.
Learn More About How MBSE Supports Your Digital Twins
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including what Formula One racing teams can teach manufacturers about building in the ability to rapidly evolve, which part of the organization David says is where change goes to die—and how to prevent it, why David says engineering is the elegant solution, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 92: Unpacking Digital Twins Series: MBSE and join us each week for a new podcast
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