2016 09 09 At INCOSE IS 2016 Conference

Holistem attended INCOSE (www.incose.org) International Symposium 2016 conference in Edinburgh in July, our personal favourite items include the following:

Sat 16/7 attended Systems Thinking in Healthcare. Some great insights into how to apply systems thinking to address the challenges encountered in organisations such as the UK NHS.

Sun 17/7 attended workshop hosted by Peter Tuddenham on ‘systems literacy’. Most significant outcome: became aware of the considerable materials that have been produced in recent years to characterise recognisable ‘systems’ aspects in a number of different sectors. For instance, see the Ocean Literacy material at http://oceanliteracy.wp2.coexploration.org/ocean-literacy-framework/navigation/. Fascinating!

Holistem organised and chaired a Panel session, “SysML in support of MBSE is easy to learn: discuss”, with four panellists represented a range of stakeholders relating to the adoption of SysML as a systems modelling language in an MBSE context. The session was well attended, led to some lively Q & A and came to a consensus ‘answer’: “yes and no”!. More to follow…

As to a few other Panels or Papers we particularly liked:

1.2 Panel: “Systems of Systems, Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet-of-Things”, chaired by Judith Dahmann of MITRE, gave in our view a really useful insight into the scope, interrelationships and overlaps of these three very topical systems domains.

4.1.1 Paper: “Introducing MBSE by using Systems Engineering Principles”, a joint paper by Saab and Syntell, gave a candid account of the challenges, pragmatic approach and successes to adoption of MBSE in a large organisation. This paper also won a Best Paper award.

4.1.2 Paper: “Getting Started with MBSE in Product Development”, was well-placed in the agenda to follow the previous paper, as it also focussed on pragmatic approach to supporting MBSE. The authors from Syncroness Inc. explained that, for their organisation’s projects, they did not need the full richness and complexity that might be implied by the metamodels underlying enterprise architecture (e.g. DODAF) and SysML schemas. So their approach was to go back to basics, understand what concepts and relationships they really needed to support the SE ‘V’ lifecycle and full traceability, and mapping to diagrams. They then built up their own ‘essential’ schema. We love it!

All in all, IS 2016 was an excellent conference, thanks to the organisers who did an outstanding job!