Benefits & Operations of MBSE: Recommendations for overcoming barriers and taking advantage of the MBSE

The growing complexity and interdisciplinarity in the development of systems increases the need for companies to apply Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). In the MBSE, requirements, the behavior and the structure of the system under consideration are defined, analyzed and maintained based on models. The potential of MBSE has so far only rarely been fully exploited in practice, as the advantages are difficult to assess economically.

In cooperation with the industrial company Siemens Digital Industries, the product development specialist group brought together the unique selling points of the approach from an academic and practical point of view. The common goal is to bring the power of MBSE to the application and to lead to a comprehensible benefit. The aim of the project was to generate scientifically sound results to improve the common understanding of industrial users, tool manufacturers and academia of MBSE.

The product development specialist group characterized relevant roles for the introduction and use of MBSE in a dedicated role model. Responsibilities and central tasks were assigned to each role. Then seven semi-structured interviews were carried out with domain-specific experts from the industrial company, in which key roles were identified by the participants and placed on a stakeholder map. In addition, the current and future skills required for the roles were assessed by the interview partners. Five key roles were selected for further detailing: Project Leader, Systems Designer, MBSE Project Manager, as well as representatives of middle management (mid-level) and upper management (C-level). The key roles were represented using the narrative personas method, which characterized additional professional and personal characteristics of the roles. Personas are fictional characters who stereotype information about individual key roles and present it in a structured manner. In this way, a strong focus on the addressed target group can be generated and the needs of individual key roles can be communicated.

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