UK Chapter

Earlier this year we made plans for 2018 and the next event in the calendar will be our summer meeting on the 25^th of July 2018. Leonardo have kindly agreed to host us at their Luton site, with a number of items on the agenda from senior engineers talking about their career paths, to a walk about tour of some of Leonardo’s sensing products leading into their integration lab where they perform integration tests of one of their most important products.

This is a great chance to get more involved with the Early Careers Forum (ECF), meet a number of your peers as well as industry experts and senior engineers. We will also be discussing the ECF’s priorities and taking forward a number of objectives we’d like to achieve in the near future.

If you are able to join us, please confirm your attendance to emmah@dot-the-eye.com by the 20^th of July2018, providing your full name, company and nationality. Leonardo have kindly offered to supply us with lunch so please can you also specify any dietary requirements when you contact us.

The Viable System Model (VSM), created by Stafford Beer over 40 years ago, has become one of the best known and widely used cybernetic and systems thinking approaches.  It is a powerful tool for the practical process of diagnosing problems in organisations, and helping to improve their functioning. 

Trevor Hilder, our speaker, is a long time Systems Thinker and VSM practitioner and has worked in, owned and managed businesses in the field of ICT since 1974.  He has applied the VSM in a wide variety of roles; ranging from training programmers, systems programming, creating one of the first database products to run on PCs, writing manufacturing systems, to building an Enterprise Resource Planning system for a convenience store chain.

Trevor had the good fortune of knowing Stafford Beer well, and was given the great complement of being told he is among the finest communicators of the concepts that underpin the model; including Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.

Building on and going beyond the VSM, Trevor has developed his own approach to understanding organisational and individual behaviours and relationships he has called the Moral Modality Framework.   This talk is an opportunity to learn about this powerful new approach as well as the VSM and to gain practical insights into their application.

Presenter: Gary Smith, Airbus

Synopsis: Bio-mimetics have often provided a useful means of inspiration for engineering design, for instance in the fabrication of materials for aerospace. One more recent area of interest, from the perspective of cyber security has been in the remarkable ability of the immune system to cope with the diversity and evolution of threats such as bacteria and viruses. The focus of this talk reflects on the architectural parallels between biological systems and engineered solutions in defence and security. Systems thinking and conceptual modelling are the tools utilized in examining the architectures and the capabilities of the biological systems such as anticipation, adaptability and self-respect. In performing such an examination, greater understanding arises with implications for system science and systems engineering.

Time will be allowed for Q&A after the presentation

Prerequisites: In order to attend please send the following information to TJRABBETS@qinetiq.com no later than COP Thursday 14th June 2017:

- Full name;

- company affiliations; 

- contact telephone number;

- contact  email;

Bring along photo ID (e.g. driving licence or passport) on the evening.

Attendees are requested to turn up after 18:30 for a 19:00 start

Agenda

- Review paper for ASEC 2018

-Use of Architecture Frameworks

-Definition of Characteristics

Updates to draft handbook

Agenda

·         General discussion

·         Review updated sections of Handbook for Services

·         Stakeholder analysis

Architectural Frameworks in Defence are changing. Tom Riley and Paul Handisides will give an overview of the new NATO Architecture Framework v4.0 and discuss its impact of current practice.

Practioners in Defence are being encouraged to move from MODAF to NAF v4.0, which introduces a more coherent organisation of views, an Architecture Development Method, and an alternative notation - Archimate.

Ahead of a Institute of Rail Signalling Engineers (IRSE) conference in April, Adam Rixon (WSP) and Kevin Gedge (Network Rail) will look at how requirements engineering is used within the rail industry.

Adam will focus on how requirements engineering can be taught to non-systems engineers with a dry-run of an interactive workshop and a discussion on how domain specialist engineers can be encouraged to write and recognise good requirements.

Kevin will look at how Goal Structured Notation (GSN) has been used in the context of requirements engineering within Network Rail projects.

Network Rail's Manchester office is easily accessible from Manchester Piccadilly station and light refreshments will be provided. If you intending to arrive by car, please email Receptionsquareone@networkrail.co.uk 48 hours before the meeting with their name, car registration and the meeting details (Room 3.7/3.8, INCOSE NWG, Starting at 18:00 on 15th March).

Our speaker is Matthew Dent.  He is a Chartered Engineer with a Masters in Systems Engineering from Loughborough University, and is now an independent consultant with recent experience implementing MBSE in the defence industry.

In this talk he will summarise a research paper he presented last summer at the 27th Annual INCOSE International Symposium (IS 2017) in Adelaide, Australia. It focuses on the application of MBSE and the development of a Knowledge Model to manage and integrate complex capability, across disparate stakeholder groups within a large organisation. He will also discuss some of the key insights from IS 2017 and he hopes to promote discussion on some of the MBSE adoption challenges that we face today.

Main Items:

Feed back from ASEC 2017

Headings/skeleton for Guidance for Systems Engineering for Services

Populating the Guidance

Notes on previous meetings on the Service Systems Engineering Wiki

The Annual Systems Engineering Conference (ASEC) is INCOSE UK's flagship annual event and brings together a wide range of professionals from a variety of backgrounds, with the common interest of building upon their Systems Engineering (SE) knowledge and sharing ideas with their peers.

INCOSE UK hosted its first annual conference in 2010, with the aim of creating the premium annual SE conference in the UK. Now in its 7th year, ASEC has indeed grown to become the UK’s foremost SE conference.

This years theme is "Pushing the Boundaries of Systems Engineering".

For more information please visit www.asec2017.org.uk

The 4th industrial revolution embraces issues around automation, digital, data exchange and “smart” systems. It includes cyber-security, virtual representation and the Internet of Things. It is claimed it will revolutionise and change the world.  This talk will explore and discuss how the fundamental systems principles of understanding functionality, connections and emergence will still apply.  Systems will become more complex rather than merely complicated, and their scope and impact will expand. This implies an evolution in Systems Engineering practice. At the core of this will be the need to apply Systems Thinking well, and so there will be an even greater need to overcome the barriers to Systems Thinking.

Richard Beasley joined Rolls-Royce in 1986 and after working on Integration Aerodynamics, Safety, Reliability and Life Cycle Engineering, became the Global Chief of Systems Engineering and in 2011 was made a Rolls-Royce Associate Fellow in Systems Engineering.  Richard is a great champion of Systems Engineering and from 2014 to 2016 was President of INCOSE UK.

Dear all,

This event is in partnership with the IET

About this event

Discuss the challenges associated with developing architectures for complex multidisciplinary systems that are diverse and heterogeneous in nature. In particularly the design approaches that consider emergent behaviours and aim to achieve particular system level attributes. I’m especially interested in scenarios where architectures are typically developed independently by discipline but there is a functional relationship apparent at the system level e.g. the performance of a modern F1 race car may be dependent on the interactions of aerodynamics, handling, power and the control philosophies. How can these diverse and complex disciplines be managed to achieve the optimum integrated system level
performance?

Speakers

Our speakers for the event include:

• Mike Wilkinson - Niteworks
• Stuart Mitchell - Yorkshire Water
• Jonathon Holt - Rolls Royce
• Professor Visakan Kadirkamanathan - Sheffield University
• Tim Rabbets - QinetiQ

To registration for this event please go to the IET website site

Dr. Steve Wright is a senior lecturer in Avionics, Systems, and Electronics in the Engineering Design and Mathematics Department at the University of the West of England, with special interest in drone technologies.

Steve will explain how the evolution and convergence of a number of separate technologies allowed for a revolutionary step change in consumer/prosumer drone capability and affordability.

Each of these technologies and how they are integrated will be described, as will the emergent challenges for system reliability. In particular, the difficulties posed by the different technical heritage these drones have compared to conventional aerospace.

We hope to provide both a static and flying display of a selection of drones.

Please note this event will be held at BAWA, and not our regular venue.

Presenter: Niki Jobson

Presentation title: Systems Thinking and Systems Engineering - Same but Different?

Presentation  synopsis: The presentation will explore the role of systems thinking (ST) in developing a shared understanding of a complex, dynamic, multi-stakeholder problem space and characterising the nature of the challenges in order to provide a firm foundation for solution development.  It will seek to tease out the similarities and differences of applying ST during problem understanding and system engineering, and will provide a high level overview of underpinning ST concepts, laws, methods and tools and an emerging competency framework.  

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There is currently a whirlwind of excitement and anticipation around innovation related to intelligent infrastructure, internet of things and smart cities. Much of this is technology-led and predicated on ‘more data equals more benefit’.

Whilst an element of this future is reliant on more open and shared data, other fundamental keys to unlock benefits quickly reside in vision, outcomes and business models. 

In this presentation, Rakesh Gaur of Transport for London explores how the skills to resolving these parameters are positively aligned to those who can apply a whole systems engineering approach; focusing on key requirements, understanding trade-offs, managing risk and knowing how to deal with the unintended. 

He will describe how the Transport for London approach blends both challenge and vision-led innovation and explores the potential consequences when a systems approach is not followed.

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Kindly hosted by

Systems and Control Research Centre
School of Mathematics Computer Science and Engineering

City, University of London

Bio

After starting his career as a train driver, Scott Meadows moved into operations and performance at Network Rail where he worked with cross-industry groups to improve the industry’s safety and reliability performance. He is currently a principal consultant at Altran, working on the Programme and Systems Integration team for the Thameslink programme. Drawing on the doctoral research he started at Leeds University at the Institute of Transport Studies, he has written a systems model of power based on his experiences in the UK Railway Industry.

Synopsis

Power is like gravity and electricity. We know it exists through its effects; we often however, explore its consequences rather than the medium itself. We all work in or for organisations where the perception of power is distributed among many actors and, when we get that distribution wrong, the effects are adverse.

How do we explore power, its nature and basis, then? Can we use systems thinking to understand the power environment and to predict and prevent problems that may arise from the perception of power distributions?

The answer is yes: through system dynamic modelling. Here we can start to model our power environment, explored through three recognised faces of power, how power is developed and exercised. But we can also add a fourth face of power, in terms of system feedback, an element that is often overlooked.

This is the Special Theory of Holes. It is a systems dynamic model of the exercise of power, taking the inputs to ‘A’ who exercises (Overt, Covert and Latent power), over ‘B’, who has power exercised over them, to achieve something, classed as an output. However nothing exists in isolation. ‘B’ sometimes responds in ways we don’t account for or fully understand: this is their feedback to the system of power exercised by A. If we want to improve working conditions and the efficiency and efficacy of our organisations, dismissing system feedback can be costly. It is here where modelling the power environment can help us understand the exercise of power in play, and identify if it is reducing our overall capability.

Scott hopes that the presentation will offer systems thinkers a vision of how they may be able to use their skills to deal with problems at work that they previously thought that systems thinking could not reach.

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The need for the MOD to set out the future strategic context was articulated in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review. To meet that requirement, the Strategic Trends Programme was started in 2001 and the first edition of Global Strategic Trends (GST) was published in 2003. Subsequently, GST, along with the Future Operating Environment have been key elements of the MOD’s contribution to both the National Security Strategy and the Strategic Defence and Security Review – and we expect them to play similar roles in the future. 

GST is the first step in a series of MOD long-term planning activities. By providing a global context, further work will then be able to examine its implications and develop policy and capability options to meet the resulting challenges. While GST is produced principally for MOD it has utility for others involved in long-term planning. The program has benefited from considerable engagement with those outside MOD – from academia, business and government both domestically and internationally. In so doing, we have deliberately attempted to avoid a single, subjective perspective.

The presentation will discuss the starting point for the next version of GST and the way trends are being identified. It will discuss some of the analysing techniques used and the process upon which the next version of GST is being produced.

Paul Norman

Paul currently works for the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre as the Technology lead for the strategic trends program. He received aMaster of Physics degree from the University of Manchester in 2000. After graduating he worked in the finance industry where he was promoted to the head of the offer and completions department within Alliance and Leicester. In 2003 Paul decided to change career and began working for the Defence Ordnance Safety Group where he worked as a numerical modeller and explosive effects scientist. In 2009 Paul studied for a Masters Degree in Explosive Ordnance Engineering at the Defence Academy. After graduation Paul decided to stay at the Defence Academy where he now works within the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre.

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The application of requirements management to civil engineering-led, rail related, multi-disciplinary design and build projects has had varied success in recent years.  Key UK Rail clients have their own requirements management processes and the challenge for designers has been to find the right processes to facilitate demonstrating compliance of design, for more than 10 different disciplines, with swift approvals, fixed construction deadlines and without introducing significant addition cost.

In this presentation, Anne Bearne of Arup shares her experiences in delivering requirements management which meets the needs of client, and project managers and which design teams can efficiently embed within their design processes and outputs. This entails a tailoring of requirements management processes to respond to the way in which railway projects, and in particular largely civils based railway projects, are delivered.  

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Workshop to develop framework that covers/relates major aspects: lifecycle, process, artefacts, stakeholders, lines of development etc.