Bridging the Gap Between Architects, Engineers and Other Stakeholders in Complex and Multidisciplinary Systems – a Holistic, Inclusive and Interactive Design Approach

Abstract

Systems Engineering and, in the recent decade, Model‐based Systems Engineering have been widely adopted in the realisation of numerous complex products. The intrinsic multi‐level and multidisciplinary nature of a complex system poses major challenges during the design stage particularly in the communication between stakeholders of the system who often speak different languages and assume different perspectives, for instance, product owners, architects, engineers and domain experts. An integral collaboration environment between domains and across levels is thus key to achieving efficient and high quality designs. This paper presents a holistic, inclusive and interactive design approach to integrate the communication between stakeholders in the design of complex and multidisciplinary systems. Holistic thinking is a fundamental practice in Systems Engineering that ensures the alignment of domain objectives with overall system objectives as the product matures. However, effective deployment of this approach is often hindered by the communication gap between system stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a simplified Systems Engineering framework as the basis to model the system using Object Process Methodology (Dori, 2002). The use of various interactive exploration methods and data visualisation techniques can facilitate an efficient collaborative design that promotes holistic thinking. The proposed approach targets the conceptual design phase, and incorporates valuable design insights that are usually only revealed in the later stages of design as the system is relatively more mature. This allows for the iteration cycle times during the conceptual design phase to be significantly shortened, well‐informed design decisions to be made resulting in a more accurate direction of resources to perform detailed engineering analyses and subsequent design optimisations.

Engineering Complicated Systems Still Needs Systems Engineering and Thinking

“…There is no doubt that the importance of understanding Complex systems and how to develop them is increasing in importance as the systems in the world become more interconnected and entangled. This is clearly a priority for the development of Systems practice, and is reflected in the upsurge in papers (Au and Ravindranath, 2020;Jonkers and Shahroudi, 2020;Keating et al, 2021;Raman et al, 2021;Wang and Mansouri, 2021).…”