Challenges and opportunities in the integration of the Systems Engineering process and the AI/ML model lifecycle

Abstract

The Digital Age, the “Society 5.0” or the “4th Industrial Revolution” has created a challenging and evolving environment in which more up‐to‐date, secure, safer, cost‐efficient and personalized products and services must be timely delivered. Furthermore, the growing interest in equipping systems with intelligence implies that the engineering process must be adapted to consider the specific characteristics of Artificial Intelligent (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) systems. From the AI/ML point of view, the possibility of following an engineering process must also imply an improvement to overcome their “hidden” technical debt. To pave the way to the development of the next generation of smart systems, a retrospective in the current engineering practice and, in the development of AI/ML systems, is presented. Afterwards, the main challenges to harmonize both disciplines are outlined to finally describe the main opportunities and expected impacts.