Systems Engineering Meets The World’s Most Daunting Challenges

It’s possible that we already have the technology and creative thinking needed to meet these challenges—if only we could get everything and everyone working together.

Dassault Systèmes has submitted this article.

Systems engineering manages complexity. Aerospace has been doing it for years. Auto manufacturing, too.

Mechanical systems engineers, electrical systems engineers, electronic systems engineers, and software systems engineers collaborate on digital platforms to design systems of systems with interoperable products. They do it through digital planning, visual ideation, modeling, feasibility assessments, prototyping, and project management in initial stages. Then, in later stages, they design and build the mechanical, electrical, and software elements.

Systems engineering educators use model-based design, model-based systems engineering (MBSE), mechatronics, and cyber-physical systems approaches to teach students how to model modern electro-mechanical systems, simulate their behavior, and design complex systems with deeply intertwined physical and software components (embedded logic/smart products).

The Platform Where It Happens

It’s not uncommon today that engineers from multiple companies, and even from within a single organization, working together on complex projects, they often use their own sets of data. However, more are moving toward digital platforms that “de-silo” that information. Platforms let engineers across multiple disciplines access single-source, real-time data, which speeds project development, cuts errors and allows more time to test new ideas.

Systems engineers on digital platforms can design and test electro-mechanical systems virtually that are connected and controlled with software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop methodologies. Mechatronics is a great example of the use of platforms to design systems of robotics, electronics, computers, and controls that have driven development of such revolutionary products as smart phones and self-driving cars.

By imagining and designing holistically for sustainable, lifetime operations, students collaborating on shared platforms can learn how to design systems of systems that also factor environmental impact, raw material sourcing, logistics, human behavior, social policy, economic activity and community life.

Versatile, customizable digital platforms open to multiple users expose students in the classroom to wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary, project-based learning opportunities. For example, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform from Dassault Systèmes has been used in such classroom projects as designing and engineering submarine drones, dual-rotor aero experiments and digital twin simulations. The platform helps students develop and transition to the latest approaches in model-based systems engineering, including mathematical and visual methods for designing complex systems, using systems modeling language (SysML) for systems engineering, mechatronics and integrated cyber and physical systems.

How Complex Can It Get?

To meet global sustainability goals, pretty much everything will have to be connected, organized efficiently, and engineered for full-life, net-zero circularity. That includes industry, government, science, markets, transportation, natural resources, citizens and communities. Given the current rate of global climate change, population growth and resource depletion, engineers have maybe one generation to figure out how to do all that—how to build tomorrow.

To better understand just how challenging that might be, engineers headed by a team from Dassault Systèmes actually did that recently with a program called “Building Tomorrow,” to show how public authorities, engineers, architects, logistics experts and builders might work together in new ways to enable more circular practices across the value chain that make a positive impact at any scale and improve quality of life.

They demonstrated their ideas by re-imagining the Eiffel Tower in Paris as a low-carbon, circular, regenerative digital twin version of the tower that could address major sustainability challenges such as accelerated urbanization, greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. The Building Tomorrow program uses an engineering icon as inspiration for an experiment in urban and infrastructure transformation for the future.

For example, using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to design and build, the team created a virtual vertical garden with 18,038 trees (which corresponds to the number of metallic parts of the Eiffel Tower), 5,500 square meters of greenhouses and garden sheds, 451 plant species, and 200 experimental and shared gardens.  

Cross-discipline engineering teams analyzed and modeled various construction scenarios that factored such parameters as the new tower’s height in the neighborhood, its shadow and effects on airflow and heat, the water it needs for vegetation, how steel components for the construction would be sourced and manufactured, transported and assembled to minimize carbon impact.  

The team showcased its work with a two-meter-high, 3D-printed replica of the tower on display at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona this past November.

Cities

In 2022, the global population reached 8 billion people, with more than half living in cities. By 2050, when the population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion, nearly 7 out of 10 people will live in cities, according to researchers at The World Bank.

Urban design and function will have to be smart and highly deliberative in managing complexity. Think about a single-cell organism. It has a metabolism that converts energy and resources into the nutrients and substances it needs. So, too, for a city. A city takes in energy, raw materials, and water and converts them into heating, entertainment, housing, food, commerce, public services, employment, education, mobility, transportation and logistics, public health and sanitation, and pretty much everything associated with city life, measured by the quality of human life it supports and nurtures. Smart cities also try to accommodate non-human life as well.

Smart cities represent collections of large-scale evolutionary distributed systems that are organizationally and operationally connected in complex systems of systems (SoS).  Planners and developers of smart cities are racing to develop SoS engineering methodologies that merge quantitative measures from city planning, network science, ecosystems studies, fractal geometry, statistical physics, and information theory to the analysis of urban form and qualitative human experience.

“Today, prominent urban design movements openly embrace complexity but must move beyond inspiration and metaphor to formalize what ‘complexity’ is and how we can use it to assess both the world as-is as well as proposals for how it could be instead,” Geoff Boeing of the University of Southern California writes in Measuring the Complexity of Urban Form and Design.

Analysts see smart cities generally developing in three layers, according to a 2018 study by McKinsey & Company. The technology base includes a critical mass of smart devices and sensors connected by high-speed communication networks. The second layer consists of specific applications that translate raw data into alerts, insight, and action. The third layer is usage—i.e., the public.

“Many applications succeed only if they are widely adopted and manage to change behavior. They encourage people to use transit during off-hours, to change routes, to use less energy and water and to do so at different times of day, and to reduce strains on the healthcare system through preventive self-care,” the report said.

Systems engineering requires flexible, adaptive mindsets, novel methodologies and broad integration of technologies across multiple disciplines. To help students acquire such experiences and skill sets, educators must provide classroom platforms that let students virtualize their ideas and experiment with complexity.

Essential Human Needs

Fast-growing urban population centers will have to provide the technological provisions for environmental, social, and economic sustainability and responsive government, air quality, waste management, housing and transportation infrastructure, communications and networked markets. Engineers must design and build sustainable, de-carbonized, energy-positive products and services for a circular economy that adapts to climate change and shifting human social activity.