Systems Engineering for the Digital Age

Chapter 7Measuring Systems Engineering Progress Using Digital Engineering

Tom McDermott¹, Kaitlin Henderson², Eileen Van Aken², Alejandro Salado³, and Joseph Bradley⁴

¹ Stevens Institute of Technology, School for Systems and Enterprises, Hoboken, NJ, USA

² Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

³ University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

⁴ Leading Change LLC, Melbourne, FL, USA

Motivation

Systems continue to grow in complexity, and with that growth comes greater difficulty in managing the development of these systems (DiMario et al. 2008). The utilization of models to design systems is increasingly considered a principle of good system design (Bahill and Botta 2008). MBSE was conceived as “the formalized application of modeling” to the systems engineering process (Friedenthal et al. 2007). DE and MBSE approaches are two components of enterprise digital transformation that have great promise to improve the efficiency and productivity of engineering activities, particularly for complex engineered systems. Organizations perceive and have cited many benefits of this transformation, but there has been little attention on formally measuring these benefits (Henderson and Salado 2021). Systems engineering as a discipline has long had difficulty providing quantifiable evidence of its value (Honour 2004); DE transformation provides an opportunity to better measure its value as more of the development process becomes captured in digital data, models, and tools. Transitioning from a document‐based ...