A Model-Based Systems Engineering Approach to Support Continuous Validation in PGE - Product Generation Engineering

Increasing customer demands, especially regarding functionality, safety and environmental sustainability, are major drivers of nowadays product development processes. Those increasing demands as well as today’s product development context of distributed interdisciplinary development teams lead to an increasing complexity of systems as well as their respective development processes. MBSE - Model-Based Systems Engineering is regarded as a promising approach to cope with this complexity. MBSE aims at supporting during the whole product lifecycle in system analysis, requirements management, design as well as verification and validation. Especially validation plays a central role in product development as it is the only activity that can ensure customer satisfaction and thus a successful product on the market. However, comprehensive MBSE-approaches to support validation in product development seem to be missing. This paper describes such a MBSE approach to support validation in product development. The approach includes an ontology of terms and their interrelations in the context of validation. The ontology is used to construct viewpoints, views and a modeling framework to structure a system model in the understanding of MBSE. In addition, a modeling method interacting with the constructed views is developed and presented. The presented approach aims at enabling a continuous validation concept, starting in the early phase of PGE - Product Generation Engineering and continuing throughout the entire lifecycle. Furthermore, the approach should support in integrating the development of products and appropriate validation systems, creating a consistent traceability of information throughout the created models. Finally, a specific focus of the approach lies on usability in order to guarantee individual and organizational acceptance. This acceptance is of particular importance to realize a human centered development as it is envisioned in approaches such as ASE - Advanced Systems Engineering.