Decision making is becoming more and more challenging due to the rise in complexity of modern technical products. A lot of industries are currently at a crossroads, and a wrong strategic or technical decision may have disastrous consequences for the future of the company. Within this paper, the SMH approach, that supports decision making processes to put emphasis on sustainable solutions regarding strategic and technical aspects, is introduced. SMH is an acronym that stands for a decision making approach that includes systems thinking (S), model-based systems engineering (M) and the human factor (H). This approach deals with the challenge to consider overall boundary conditions and interactions of the system, the decision which models need to be built in order to have the best data support possible, and the identification what influence the human factor plays in analyzing the data and the consequent decision making based on it. The importance of the human factor is often neglected in technical processes, which may lead to costly mistakes. This theoretical approach is applied to the use case of a chief executive officer (CEO) who has to decide on allocation of research and development (R&D) resources to future powertrain technologies.

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During a product development process, decisions constantly have to be made. The success of the development therefore heavily depends on the quality of the decisions taken. Every decision itself is mainly influenced by two factors. On the one hand, it is the availability of system-relevant information and to what extend that information is reliable. On the other hand, the humans, and accordingly their, e.g., experience, emotional state, and knowledge, who are responsible for making the decision play an important role. To support the decision-making process, this chapter focuses on the non-visible aspects, namely, the inner processes of humans, which determine the outcome of a decision. In that context a model is presented which visualizes the process of believing while a decision is about to be made.

This paper describes the concept of a method that uses an existing system model, that describes the system's functions, to select the most suitable models for development. The term model is understood to encompass models used during the development of systems that: have a certain degree of formalism, are digitizable, connectable and processable. The method describes how specific models that are required can be identified and how they could be connected. The method concept is explained using a well‐understood example taken from the development of automotive powertrains. After stating current challenges and problems in the development of complex systems in the automotive domain, a system cube is used as a structuring principle for models that describe certain system aspects such as structure and behavior. This concept acts as a starting point for the selection of the most suitable specific models allocated to system models based on the functional description of the considered system. Finally, the contribution of this research to the realization of a digital thread is discussed and future research topics are outlined.

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