Benefits & Operations of MBSE: Recommendations for overcoming barriers and leveraging MBSE benefits

The growing complexity and interdisciplinarity in the development of systems increases the need for companies to bring Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) into use. In MBSE, requirements, the behavior and the structure of the system under consideration are defined, analyzed and maintained in a model-based manner. The potential of MBSE has so far rarely been exploited in practice, as the benefits are difficult to evaluate economically.

In cooperation with the industrial company Siemens Digital Industries, the product development group brought together the unique selling points of the approach from an academic and practical perspective. The common goal is to bring the power of MBSE into application and lead to a comprehensible benefit. The goal of the project was to generate scientifically sound results to improve the common understanding of industrial users, tool manufacturers and academia of MBSE.

For this purpose, the product development specialist group characterized relevant roles for the introduction and use of MBSE in a dedicated role model. Responsibilities and central tasks were assigned to each role. Subsequently, seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with domain-specific subject matter experts from the industrial company, in which key roles were identified by the participants and located in a stakeholder map. In addition, current and future required competencies of the roles were assessed by the interview partners. Five key roles were selected for further detailing: Project Leader, Systems Designer, MBSE Project Manager, and representatives of middle management (mid-level) and upper management (C-level). The key roles were represented using the narrative personas method, which characterized additional professional and personal attributes of the roles. Personas are fictional characters that stereotype and present information about individual key roles in a structured way. This can create a strong focus on the addressed target group and enables the communication of the needs of individual key roles.