Interactive Model‐Centric Systems Engineering

Summary

Models are increasingly used for decision‐making in systems engineering, and while there have been many advancements in technical aspects, the sociotechnical aspects have received much less attention. This chapter discusses a research program on Interactive Model‐Centric Systems Engineering (IMCSE), originating from the unique opportunity to investigate the various aspects of humans interacting with models and model‐generated data, in the context of systems engineering practice. We first introduce the background and motivations, including seven envisioned future vignettes from two perspectives of interaction‐centric and model‐centric. We then present highlights of four selected studies from the larger research program. The first is model‐centric decision‐making and trust, sharing findings from an interview‐based study and guiding principles for model trust derived from this work. The second section discusses work on multi‐stakeholder negotiation through models within the context of tradespace exploration. The third study, model choice and trade‐off, shares exploratory research to address two main types of models used in early lifecycle systems engineering: evaluative models and value models. Fourth, we describe our exploratory investigation of model curation, highlighting research into enterprise level governance and curated collections of models.