The Engineering function in Electronic Systems is in the process of transforming how it develops products. The goal is to more rapidly and effectively innovate, develop, and deliver capabilities to our customers.
To accomplish this, the team is on a multi-year journey to expand use of digital engineering (DE). In short, DE advances design creation, analysis, verification, and maturation by connecting and communicating system design information through digital models and artifacts – rather than through a mix of standalone design artifacts and Microsoft Office documents.
In the ideal future state, these models can be used to represent nearly every aspect of a product throughout its life cycle: from requirements, architecture, hardware, software, and firmware, to performance tests, mission performance simulations, and dozens of other purposes. Project artifacts such as specifications, technical drawings, and analytical results would also be digital.
The power of DE is realized when all of these pieces of data are connected. Together, they create the single, authoritative source of truth (ASoT) for project data. It is the backbone of DE by which everyone involved across a product’s life cycle can store, reference, manage, and update project information in real time.
This is a game changer because it enables seamless collaboration and accelerates development in ways that traditional methods cannot. Historically, different engineering tools have been unable to communicate with each other, and data sets have been stored in separate silos. The digital threads bridge these gaps.
For years, pockets of engineers in different business areas have matured their use of models, particularly to develop hardware and software including simulation and test. Since mid-2023, all new Electronic Systems programs use digital engineering, starting with model-based systems engineering (MBSE). Through MBSE, engineers represent the system’s architecture, behavior, and performance, and virtually simulate how it will work to identify potential problems that could be resolved before the system is built. This reduces errors and rework, increasing efficiency and productivity while clearly communicating the system architecture to development teams.
With MBSE, teams have been up to 40 percent faster in reaching their System Requirements Review, where customers ensure that the system requirements are well-defined, complete, and consistent with their needs and expectations. The quality of their architectures is also better.
“It’s a small step that represents big change,” said vice president of Engineering Allan McQuarrie. “It creates the desired foothold for advancing our model-based engineering. Now other disciplines can derive their requirements and produce content in alignment with the systems model.”
Last year, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) began requiring digital engineering on new programs aligned with the DoD Digital Engineering Strategy.
“Our progress to date has kept pace with customer expectations for model-based engineering and digital engineering,” said McQuarrie. “We have also stood up the on-premise cloud computing infrastructure to support the computing, and host common engineering desktops and applications suites for the engineering disciplines. The next step in the evolution of our model-based engineering is to make the connections.”
This year, Engineering teams are creating and executing road maps that will guide how they will connect all their tools and data within digital engineering environments, in U.S. segments and Rochester, UK. In these environments, programs will create their threads connecting the authoritative data and models that provide actionable information to decision makers throughout the life cycle.
First, the teams must achieve interoperable tools for seamless data exchange, which involves standard data formats, security and access controls, and change management that synchronizes complex and changing product designs, requirements, and configurations.
“At its core, model-based engineering (MBE) aims to transform the way information is generated and managed,” said Jim Wankel, acting director of ES’ Model-Based Engineering Capability Group. “The result of this will enable our team to make decisions earlier in the product life cycle with higher confidence, have a higher quality product and, through validated models, allow us to better understand product capability across the mission environment envelope.“
Digital threads will allow engineers to better evaluate their designs. For example, an engineer designing a system component could conduct a trade evaluationof a component part to see the impact it has at the system and mission levels by connecting to the system and mission models.
The threads will also move data more quickly through the engineering process as a single source, rather than today’s practice of having to translate it into different states such as CAD files, drawings, and production aids. These involve manual translations that can introduce errors and require rework cycles, said Neil Clarke, director of the Engineering team at ES’ site in Rochester, U.K.
Other major benefits of the threads include the ability to: continuously improve the model throughout development and with feedback from the field; leverage core design models and artifacts across ES programs to save time and budget, and conceivably even leverage digital threads created by another program.
This is just the beginning. The digital thread is an operational breakthrough of such tremendous importance, all the possibilities are still yet to be discovered.
“How we apply artificial intelligence to an automated digital environment is so exciting, we can’t yet imagine all the potential benefits it offers,” said Clarke. “It’s like when first-generation cell phones were introduced. Who could have imagined all the functionality we’d expect from a smart phone a little over a decade later.”
The teams face considerable challenges in gaining connectivity across the engineering teams supporting business areas with diverse tools, methods, and data formats.
Wankel’s team is working to launch the Data Web Express (DWE), a digital engineering environment that will provide our U.S. defense engineers with the ability to build and manage digital threads from common tools and analysis methodologies, streamlining the decision-making process. We’re currently testing the DWE in a controlled setting, with plans to roll it out to various programs later this year. While we’ve made progress in connecting some of the tools that help us architect products, there’s still more work to be done to fully integrate all the necessary systems. Models for hardware and software are currently being connected as performance models are still federated. In addition to these, the team is also focused on modeling that confirms manufacturability and affordability – creating a connection to factory test data which will serve to confirm model accuracy and design optimization.
“ES has established significant momentum in embracing digital engineering and model-based engineering. Though the engineering work does not change, and the method expedites the process, it does require a change in our mindset and our culture,” said Wankel. “We will learn to rely on the analytics of validated models, but that won’t come easy. As engineers, we need to see proof before acceptance, and this can take time. Mindset shifts can be hard. We ask that each of us lean into model-based engineering and evaluate its merits.”
In the U.K., the team is focusing on the early stages of connecting tools together and the data models required to create conformity. This sets the foundation to implement digital threads. “We are moving toward an incremental infrastructure release initially focused on upgrading key tools with inbuilt interconnectivities,” said Clarke. “These will form our digital backbone on which we can define a digital process set fully embracing MBE and generative artificial intelligence.”
The long-term goal for digital engineering is to connect digital threads across the entire product life cycle from mission modeling assessments, product design, verification, through manufacturing and sustainment, all while providing visibility across stakeholder functions, including Contracts, Engineering, Operations, Program Management, and Quality. This is just within BAE Systems.
“Our customers and suppliers have their own digital enterprises that they are operating in and, generally we are at different levels of maturity – not always using the same tool sets, and not capturing project requirements in the same way,” said Mike Crawford, engineering director for the Controls & Avionics Solutions and Power & Propulsion Solutions business areas. “As we move forward on this journey, it will be important for us to not only progress the maturity of our internal capabilities but also understand how we integrate into our customers’ and suppliers’ environments. When we are successful with this, it will unlock a tremendous amount of value to our customers and our business.”
With companies across the aerospace and defense industry on the same path, MBSE is being done in a federated way.
“The long-term plan is to integrate our Engineering teams and functional stakeholders, our customers, our suppliers,” said McQuarrie. “The challenge is to get all of us synched up and connected. At end of the day, it’s about bringing that whole value chain together to focus innovation and development for the greatest impact on our customer missions.”
By Barbara Driscoll, Communications