About Digital Engineering

Technology moves fast. You need a partner that moves fast and keeps you up to speed with the latest in tech. With a long history of solving some of the most complex defense and aerospace technology challenges, BAE Systems helps customers harness the power of digital engineering and focuses it on their markets and missions.

We use a digital engineering ecosystem that shortens your development timelines and manages the complexity of today’s advanced systems. We employ the latest model-based engineering tools and processes to digitally design products and test the performance throughout the development lifecycle. This way you can make informed decisions about new products before they hit the production line. This gives you peace of mind and gets you to market with a mission-ready product faster than ever before.

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With your future in mind, we design modular open systems for easy modifications and updates to components, subsystems, and software that avoid entire system redesigns when a change is needed. This keeps you up to pace with new technology upgrades and mission requirements, adhering to the Defense Standardization Program’s Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) framework objectives.

By taking an agile approach, we focus on modeling at precisely the right level of fidelity. This allows us to address critical operational and technical challenges most effectively to provide the capability you need when you need it most.

Through high-fidelity simulations and assessing modeling data, we evaluate product requirements within a mission context and create design trade-offs to predict the impact of design changes. This allows us to design it right from the start so that we can avoid prolonged development timelines. We do this in robust digital threads that connect models from all domains to the program’s “authoritative source of truth,” which gives our customers ongoing oversite to catch any issues early, avoiding rework and redesign.

It’s not enough to simulate across different mission scenarios. That’s why we build working environments to connect our tools and people together into a digital engineering ecosystem. By integrating this connection, we open the door to greater collaboration across teams, to sustain your product from proof-of-concept to its last day in service.

We also apply artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as coding assistance, and an internal large language model supporting tools for general chat, document interactions, program requirements extractions, and a quick search of policy and procedure documents. All of these are force multipliers in shortening our product development cycle times, accelerating programs, and reducing time spent on tasks to allow our teams to focus on more complex problems.

Partner for a More Productive Digital Future

We’re not advancing digital engineering alone. BAE Systems partners with stakeholders in the aerospace industry and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to understand and align to their digital engineering strategies. These insights inform our digital engineering ecosystem and help us work side-by-side with you to create advanced technology solutions.

At BAE Systems, we understand your mission and put you first. Let us partner with you to solve your toughest technology challenges with our broad portfolio, deep expertise, and commitment to rapid delivery of mission critical capabilities, helping you protect what matters most.

Simply stated, digital engineering is an integrated digital approach to product design that uses “single source of truth” data and modeling across engineering disciplines. It accelerates and improves the design, development, operation, and ongoing sustainability of complex products, including integrated systems, throughout their life cycle. While lowering costs, this approach fields products faster with greater interconnectivity when compared to traditional engineering methods. It has also been found to result in better quality with more informed decision-making throughout the development process. This is particularly important for complex products developed that require input and approvals by multiple stakeholders at every stage, such as for government, military, or public infrastructure applications.

Due to the increasing complexity of modern products, the digital engineering category also typically incorporates complementary sub-categories, including model-based systems engineering (MBSE), digital twins, robotic process automation (RPA), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), model-based verification and validation (MBVV), agile digital engineering (ADE), virtual prototyping, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithmic models, and others. In consideration of these further complexities, digital engineering projects today require an integration and alignment of both technical capabilities and workplace behaviors to be effective.

Advanced Technical Requirements

Digital engineering involves constructing computer models that represent the physical and performance characteristics of a new complex product or system being developed. System modeling processes utilizes digital data and digital connectivity to form a comprehensive “digital thread” of information. This can be used to integrate and accelerate the product’s design, development, delivery, and lifecycle management.

Digital engineering utilizes more sophisticated simulations and design analysis resulting in more agile, higher-performing work products throughout the value stream than would be possible by using, for example, a more traditional engineering approach.

Integrated Workplace Behaviors

The success of digital engineering requires an engineering culture of collaborative and integrated development teams, made up of well-trained and enthusiastic adopters of its development model. First, it depends on the team commitment to use the data created by digital threads as a “single source of truth” that all stakeholders will depend on to keep the work on track throughout development. It also requires a commitment to integrate all stakeholders into the process, including acquisition teams, external development partners, end users, and decision-makers. Digital engineering needs these stakeholders to work together fluidly, applying practices consistently at every turn to deliver on the accelerating demand for new complex products and capabilities. That includes the shared data mindset that each must maintain in their role throughout a product’s lifecycle.

These requirements can be a challenge for those trained and accustomed to working in other ways. This prevailing need for cohesion and inter-reliability can help speed each stage of the development process, while also building a more unified culture of productivity and integrity that benefits both the development company and its clientele.

Transforming the Future

An enterprise-wide adoption of digital engineering and its attendant digital practices is often referred to as digital transformation. By implementing it throughout our product development processes, BAE Systems uses advanced digital technologies, model-based engineering, and integrated, data-driven decision-making to transform not just product development effectiveness, but that of its client companies.

In short, digital engineering uses cutting-edge development environment integration, cross-domain digital modeling, and MBSE techniques to advance traditional product development practices. This drives innovation, productivity, cost-savings, and the ability to take on modern engineering challenges more effectively.

Digital engineering matters – and should matter to any product developer – for several key reasons:

• Innovation agility. Digital engineering makes use of virtual prototyping, structural simulation, machine learning, and data analytics. This assists design engineers to evolve concepts virtually and experiment with various iterations quickly and precisely, eliminating the need to build physical models. This accelerates innovation timelines considerably, which in turn also reduces time-to-market delivery.
• Increased productivity and decreased costs. Recent studies of companies that have introduced digital engineering into their development process show productivity gains of as much as 25 percent, most of which is seen in the accelerated design processes. The use of virtual testing and simulations based on a single source of truth discover issues early, reduce errors, and make first-pass successes more likely in ways not possible with traditional, expensive, and time-consuming physical prototypes, and destructive testing.
• Data driven decision-making. Digital system modeling, simulations, analytics, and traceable digital thread interactivity gives innovators insight into how a complex product will perform. Having more informed decisions, mitigates risks and uncertainties, leading to better architectural and designs choices.
• Better collaboration, improved workflow. Digital engineering platforms and an integrated digital thread fosters seamless communication, data sharing, and coordination among all project stakeholders, including cross-functional and geographically dispersed team members.
• Optimized sustainability. One key benefit of digital engineering is that it facilitates the incorporation of long-term maintenance and sustainability management into every product design. Since each design is a digital twin of the physical product, engineers can forecast and design for prolonged sustainability during design phase and return to the computer model to address unforeseen issues that may arise in the future. Incorporating digital engineering throughout the product lifecycle lowers long-term sustainment costs.
• Complexity demands digitalization. Today’s advanced and complex technologies have changed the world and impacted all our lives. Products developed by the aerospace, automotive, and defense industries, for example, demand the rapid adoption of digital engineering to keep up with accelerating demands for evolving technologies like autonomous vehicles, advanced weapons systems, and more. Getting there requires a digital approach.

Today it is imperative for companies to stay competitive and ready to meet rapidly evolving market needs. BAE Systems’ agile and flexible digital engineering teams ensure that our clients and their stakeholders do exactly that.

Rooted in MBSE and the digital twin design concept, digital engineering was introduced at a Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) conference in 2002 to accelerate the development of complex products and systems by maximizing digital efficiencies and clearing away traditional “source of truth” differences often seen between, for example, the electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and power engineering design teams.

By creating a new product design “digital twin” – a virtual representation of a physical product design – the new digital engineering design process brought all parties into the design flow together, using the virtual image – the twin – as the “single source of truth” for all stakeholders to adhere to. It also connected the physical object to the virtual representation using digital design software that enabled design updates, assured shared accuracy, supported data tracking, and more.

An evolutionary step in engineering

This virtual approach is similar to the idea behind MBSE, in that a model is the center of the design engineering process instead of the traditional document-centered approach to aligning specifications, design, analysis, verification, and validation. MBSE united the concepts of modeling, systems thinking, and systems engineering. Digital engineering took it to the next level by replacing physical models with virtual ones and adding the digital connectivity component. This digital engineering assures when a change happens in one area of the design process, it is accounted for in all related areas of the design and all stakeholders are made aware.

Digital engineering as a distinct approach has evolved quickly, with both growth in technical capabilities and demand across a range of industries, propelling incredible advancement in just a few years. Giving product developers the power to define, model, review, and iterate designs quickly and accurately to accelerate product development. That’s a winner in any industry – aerospace, architecture, defense, cyber, transportation, autonomous devices, construction, consumer goods, and beyond.

Key drivers of transformation

One of the primary reasons for the rapid growth of digital engineering has been the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), as well as demand from the intelligence community and other U.S. government agencies. The DoD’s digital engineering Strategy, first released in 2018 and since expanded, calls for “an integrated digital approach that uses authoritative sources of systems’ data and models as a continuum across disciplines to support lifecycle activities from concept through disposal.” Since then, the DoD’s position has been reinforced across the U.S. defense infrastructure by the addition of more service-specific calls for the digital transformation of defense sector product development, including by the:

• U.S. Army Digital Transformation Strategy
• U.S. Air Force (USAF) Digital Building Code
• U.S. Navy/U.S. Marine Corps Digital Systems Transformation Strategy
• NASA Digital Engineering Strategy
• U.S. Space Force Digital Engineering Ecosystems
• The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies

The continued growth of threats worldwide impels an ongoing need for new advanced defense systems to be developed faster and more efficiently he DoD’s strategy alone – supported by its departments – assures that digital engineering will continue to be in high demand for that market segment.

More broadly, digital engineering has had a major impact in multiple business categories, from energy and finance to healthcare, transportation, and other non-military products. Digital engineering environments will continue to make a strong imprint on history not only for advancing the development of complex products, but for its “single source of truth” approach, advancing the management of systems complexity across most categories. BAE Systems is well-positioned to play a leading role in implementing those advances across both governmental and commercial markets.

The simple fact is that digital engineering is used today by any leading product design and manufacturing companies that intend to be around tomorrow. The adoption of digital engineering by first augmenting, then replacing traditional processes in the development of complex products has escalated quickly since its introduction. In just under two decades digital engineering has rapidly become a required capability for any company that wants to make their product development process more agile and responsive to market demands, especially when those products consist of multiple integrated systems.

The number and variety of digital engineering adopters continue to grow, they include designers and makers of:

• Aircraft (commercial, military, personal, and experimental)
• Automobiles, including autonomous vehicles
• Banking payment and transaction systems
• Communications platforms
• Internet of Things (IoT) devices and systems
• Mainframe systems
• Public transit vehicles and systems
• Satellites
• Smart grid power infrastructures
• Space exploration vehicles
• Unmanned vehicles (UAVs, UUVs, etc.)
• Wind turbines and solar panels
• Electronic Warfare (EW) systems
• Watercraft (Boats, Ships, Submersibles, etc.)

The most consequential force behind the creation and widespread adoption of digital engineering, is the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), which announced its Digital Engineering Strategy in 2018, saying “the strategy promotes the use of digital representations of systems and components and the use of digital artifacts to design and sustain national defense systems.” The scope of the Digital Engineering Strategy has been increased and refined since its initial release, but in terms of its strategic goals for the use of digital engineering, their top five are:

• “Formalize the development, integration, and use of models to inform enterprise and program decision-making.” This goal draws a line between the traditional engineering methods used in the past and establishing model-based design engineering as the standard from that point forward.
• “Provide an enduring, authoritative single source of truth.” This reinforces the switch away from often ungainly multi-source, paper-based engineering to the use of one accessible digital model as the “single source” which all project stakeholders can depend on for a true representation of where they stand.
• “Incorporate technological innovation to improve the engineering practice.” This is about not getting caught up in any specific technologies or methods, but continuously employing “technological innovation” to move forward.
• “Establish a supporting infrastructure and environment to perform activities, collaborate and communicate across all stakeholders.” The purpose here is to encourage holistic integration that technologically forms a digital thread that connects and maintains all information in the project, but also culturally connects team members to keep them all involved, up to speed, and fulfilling their roles.
• “Transform the culture and workforce to adopt and support digital engineering across the lifecycle.” This is about long-term, ongoing change management to keep the good that comes from digital engineering going forward.

As a result, every organization that supplies products to or develops systems for a DoD department or agency today is required to know about and incorporate digital engineering into its product development practices throughout the lifecycle of the resulting products, systems, and subsystems which they design, produce, and/or obtain for any part of the U.S. Department of Defense.

For the DoD and each of its military departments – U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and U.S. Space Force – the Digital Engineering Strategy has been nothing short of monumental. It has already led to greater efficiency and improved the quality of acquisition activities, making it easier than ever to make informed decisions that save lives on day one when implementing new technologies into weapons systems for deployment or optimizing disparate logistics chains. The same can be said about DoD development partners that have utilized this strategy to create a more uniform standard that allows those partner companies to optimize their own expertise and capabilities to fulfill and deliver on new products and systems with agility, accuracy, and the right mix of advanced resources.

Implementing the Digital Engineering Strategy within DOD development partners has created more uniform standards optimizing expertise and capabilities to deliver products with agility, accuracy, and the right mix of advanced technologies.

Partnering for innovation

The DoD has seen digital engineering applied rapidly to product development for new weapons, electronic warfare (EW), cyber resilience, and other defense assets. Initial results indicate that it can improve and accelerate the development of any complex product, whether it is for military, exploratory, commercial, industrial, or other application use. With a development partner, like BAE systems, that is deeply experienced and thoroughly committed to agile digital engineering, any product innovator should expect accelerated design development, and delivery of complex products that significantly outpaces traditional product engineering practices.

The term digital engineering is often confused with other types of engineering, but especially software engineering because software programs and systems are digital in form. However, they are, however, very different. Software engineering refers specifically to the development of software products, while digital engineering is a product development tool that uses digital modeling technologies, automation tools, and practices to accelerate the development of complex, multi-system products.

Because of this field’s rapid growth, its cross-discipline functions, and the digitalization of so many aspects of daily life, digital engineering is also often confused with electrical engineering, propulsion engineering, automotive engineering, aerospace engineering, and digital design engineering – but it is different.

While the nomenclature can be bewildering, the most important takeaway is that in every sector where digital engineering has been deployed, it has proven to be highly effective at accelerating development, containing costs, and improving product lifecycle management (PLM). From architecture, banking, construction, and cyber resilience to manufacturing, robotics, transportation, and national defense, the benefits of advanced digital engineering continue to expand exponentially.

To be clear, you first need to understand that there are two titles that people frequently use, rightly or wrongly, interchangeably – digital engineer and digital design engineer. They are both important and highly valued positions, but there is a difference in the type of work they do, their level of specialization.

Digital design engineers are electrical engineers who specialize in creating digital systems and circuits. Digital design engineers work within multiple industries to include Aerospace and Defense, Automotive, Medical, Computing, Industrial Automation, Consumer Electronics, and telecommunications. They often develop custom Integrated Circuits and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) utilizing RTL (Register Transfer Level) hardware description languages (HDLs) like Verilog or VHDL.

Digital engineers are product engineers who use digital engineering principles, technologies, and techniques to develop complex products and systems such as aircraft, weapons systems, automobiles, autonomous vehicles, satellite communications systems, medical devices, and more across a range of industries. Within the context of explaining digital engineering, it is the broader roles of a digital engineer that are pertinent here.

One of the central roles carried out by digital engineers is product design. Specifically, it is the design of complex, multi-system products that in past generations required conceptualizing building, testing, and repeated iteration of physical models as part of the product design process. These product engineers are called digital engineers because instead of building physical models to approximate their design for a product using traditional practices from a mix of engineering disciplines, they build clear, precise digital models that represent a product accurately and serve as the “single source of truth” through every stage of development for every team member involved in the project.

Tasks and responsibilities in the role of digital engineer during development of a new complex product typically include:

• Design and prototyping.
  • Developing abstract concepts and the technical design specifications necessary to create representative digital models that function as a “digital twin” of physical products.
  • Employing industry-leading digital design techniques and tools to craft integrated functional systems and devices into working models that can be examined, discussed, and adjusted as needed.
  • Creating and sharing designs for evaluation by all development team members to ensure accuracy, functionality, and efficiency prior to physical manufacturing.
  • Establishing post-production criteria and management protocols for long-term product sustainability that, when implemented appropriately, will ensure the longest possible lifecycle for the product at the lowest reasonable cost.
• Model-based verification and validation.
  • Performing thorough verification and validation procedures – both directly and through shared analysis by fellow development team members – to identify, track, and fix design flaws or potential problems.
  • Simulating a range of operating conditions and conducting rigorous validation tests to verify the correctness and integrity of the product design and its sub-systems.
• Design optimization and performance enhancement.
  • Reviewing analysis and test results to optimize product designs to ensure that necessary performance measures of the product and its subsystems are met or exceeded.
  • Analyzing and enhancing the performance of the product’s existing subsystems, then re-testing the overall product to measure and verify the success or failure of performance enhancements.
• Digital thread collaboration and integration.
  • Collaborating with the product development stakeholders, including project managers, designers, hardware and software engineers, directors, and others at the company, company partners, and the client to maintain the digital thread throughout development. Some of these may be on-premises, while others may work at various dispersed locations.
  • Leveraging the expertise of key project collaborators to ensure that the product and system designs adhere to specified requirements criteria, performance, and industry (e.g. safety and/or security) standards.
  • Integrating individual technologies and subsystems into the overall product design.
• Product and process documentation.
  • Documenting all product design specifications and testing procedures, as well as generating technical reports and all product maintenance/sustainment manuals.
  • Establishing and executing regular communications with the design team and all other stakeholders. This includes presenting design concepts, documenting and integrating team input, and tracking progress throughout development.
• Ongoing learning and adaptation.
  • Consistently updating yourself and team members with the latest digital engineering technologies, methods, and trends as they pertain to your industry, including updates to MBSE, ADE, V&V, and more.
  • Adapting team processes and technologies to new product design tools, platforms, and development environments.

As important as digital engineers are to the development of complex products today, their importance will only grow in the future. They are pivotal in shaping the digital design modeling landscape that is replacing the slower, often not-so-integrated document? documented approach used for generations. Their expertise extends from initial concept through optimization and sustainability, leading the advancement of more rapid, affordable, and traceable complex product developments for the generations to come.