Towards Industrial Integration of MBSE into PLM for Mission‐Critical Systems

AbstractModel‐Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is a natural choice for engineering complex systems of systems that involve hardware and software components, deal with a huge number of heterogeneous requirements, and require solid verification and validation at multiple levels. However, industrial MBSE adoption requires solving multiple problems. Most of them originate when MBSE is incorporated into the production environment. For enterprise‐level industrial solutions, this means integration into the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tool chain. This integration covers requirements, product line, variability, design, simulation, BOM, configuration, version, and CAD drawings management. The problem is that there is no clear path for integration. Due to the various types of data that can be interchanged between PLM and MBSE, the existing integration solutions are patchy and driven by clients use cases only. There is not enough information about recommended MBSE – PLM integration practices, use cases, and methods. This is a huge problem in the context of large‐scale partnerships working on mission‐critical systems, where engineering data has to be processed and managed in the most consistent way so as to be used by all the partners and through the different PLM activities. In this paper we will overview real‐world PLM and MBSE integration cases from our company experience. We will map a path toward the right solution, and will dive deep into the practical side of Product Line Engineering (PLE) and MBSE integration.