In Stay Sharp Episode 122, Product Line Engineering: MBSE for Batteries, Tools, and Beyond, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant welcome returning guests Eran Reinshmidt and Safae El Abkari of Dassault Systèmes. Eran and Safae expand on the insight they offered in Episode 119, MBSE Isn’t Just for Rockets: Winning in Fast-Moving Consumer Markets, by offering unexpected case studies that demonstrate how MBSE enables manufacturers in all industries to manage complexity without slowing time to market.
Meeting Challenges with MBSE
The keyword for MBSE is complexity. Products, regardless of type or industry, are becoming more and more multi-disciplinary, involving all types of engineering: mechanical, electrical, and software. Eran says, “The product is complex, but also the collaboration aspects become complex. And companies need still to deliver the product, to accelerate the development time, to be on time to the market.” An example is a product development process where all three disciplines work on their disciplines, but the software engineers can’t test their contribution until there’s a physical prototype to embed the software in, which means they sit idle and lose time. With MBSE, they could implement behavior modeling that enables the software engineers to test their software earlier.
What’s critical is moving away from a serialized way of working, with everyone in their silo, to collaboration between the disciplines. “The business problem is time. How do you shrink the time when, in fact, the product got more complex?” Jonathan asks. “The answer’s got to be, you have to coordinate better. You have to do things in parallel. And how do you do it? Well, that’s where the MBSE part comes in.” The answer for accelerating the development process is virtual prototyping, which requires a common interface for each siloed discipline to write or develop to. MBSE supports that by helping create a common language of understanding.
Another use case Safae describes is manufacturers that want to perform trade studies. She explains, “We can link the behavior, make some parameters and link them together, and then study the performance—create reusable models with variable parameters which allow rapid evaluation of multiple options.” Instead of having to design a concept to test it, then design another to test again, if you know the parameters, MBSE can help you identify good options and eliminate others—similar to the way a smart playlist would function in a music app. “Instead of using slow, spreadsheet-based, serial analysis with department trade offs and department hand-offs, we will have an integrated parallel analysis with the living model,” she adds.
Where MBSE Makes a Difference
Product line engineering (PLE) is an area beyond configured products where MBSE can be useful, because it requires management of complex parts. MBSE offers a way to manage a variety of options and plan how to include those capabilities in your products. It can also be useful in the verification and validation (V&V) phase of the product development cycle, because that phase is tied to requirements that need to be checked before going to production or creating a physical prototype. “We can integrate, let’s say the electronic component first, then integrate it with the mechanical component, then add the software part to it, then validate the whole product,” Safae says. “We can check the product we are creating, the virtual twin of the product is what we intended to have.” And if it’s not what the requirement specified, it’s a loop where you take the information from the simulation and go back to requirements or to the models to make adjustments.
Another use case they offer is MBSE and the manufacturing line, especially in consumer industries with lots of product variability coming out of one shop. Those manufacturers need to produce multiple products on the same line, and they need to be able to adapt quickly, but orchestrating a manufacturing line is a big task. Eran notes, “A lot of companies are now starting to look at MBSE as an approach to model your systems inside your manufacturing facility, in your factory. How can we control all the variabilities of these lines in the factory in order to optimize the way that we are producing our products?” MBSE provides a systems-based approach to the product, product family, manufacturing process, and different manufacturing lines. Safae adds, “The final message is that MBSE makes development faster and more predictable.”
Learn More About Where MBSE Can Help You
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why Safae calls MBSE magic, what MBSE use cases support product variability and repairability, how consumer manufacturers can incorporate MBSE, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 122: Product Line Engineering: MBSE for Batteries, Tools, and Beyond and join us each week for a new podcast.
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