2024/01/04 by James S. Wheaton, Daniel R. Herber, Wheaton, James S. +1 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #Business Process Modeling and Analysis #FOS: Electrical engineering #Software Engineering Techniques and Practices #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2401.02059
openalex publication_date 2024/01/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Digital Engineering currently relies on costly and often bespoke integration of disparate software products to assemble the authoritative source of truth of the system-of-interest. Tools not originally designed to work together become an acknowledged system-of-systems, with their own separate feature roadmaps, deprecation, and support timelines. The resulting brittleness and conglomeration of disparate interfaces in the Digital Engineering Ecosystem of an organization drains resources and impairs efficiency and efficacy. If Model-Based Systems Engineering were applied to this problem, a complete system architecture model would be defined, and a purpose-built computing system-of-systems would be constructed to satisfy stakeholder needs. We have decades of research in computer science, cybersecurity, software and systems engineering, and human-computer interaction from which to draw that informs the design of a Seamless Digital Engineering tooling system, but it would require starting from a clean slate while carefully adopting existing standards. In this paper, this problem space and solution space are characterized, defining and identifying Seamless Digital Engineering as a grand challenge in Digital Engineering research.