Optimal Architecting Strategy for Partially Developed Products: Challenges and Solutions

Functional/logical architecture development using Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) brings in benefits of efficient and less error-prone development for complex products. However, today many enterprises’ existing infrastructures, such as requirements and processes, are not compatible with MBSE technologies. During migration from such a non-MBSE environment to an MBSE paradigm, many challenges arise and cause significant modeling difficulties. Dealing with them incorrectly, beyond errors and usability problems, will at least cause prohibitive costs that likely lead to program failures and prevent the adoption of MBSE. In this paper, these severe challenges are described, and the methods and strategies for functional/logical architecture development for a partially built product are developed. Specifically, an algorithm is devised to find the minimum number of requirements to support the modeling of a specific safety case, a functional element or a system component. In addition, a strategy is developed to architect the functional/logic architecture in an optimal way. With results from a study case of an airplane electrical power system, it is shown that the speed of modeling is significantly improved, some at approximately 5 times. This largely increases the chances of meeting Preliminary Design Review and avoiding program failures, which can enable further motivations of migrating towards MBSE in the enterprise.