Roleplaying made easy – A Meta-model for Roles in Systems Engineering

Tomorrow’s products and services will be more intelligent, more connected, and more autonomous. Product development is becoming more complex as well; and success will increasingly depend on transdisciplinarity and Systems Engineering. Competence and knowledge management are key factors in this evolution. Implementing clear and focused role models is one way of addressing these issues while making organizational structures more flexible. Role models are groups of company-specific role profiles with clearly defined tasks, competences, responsibilities, and authorities. This paper aims to develop a meta-model as the foundation for building role frameworks in Systems Engineering. It consists of actors, roles, and organizational tasks that are associated with each other as well as other elements. The meta-model, hence, structures the elements and relationships that must be considered when building a role model.