Challenges with MBSE: Engineering and IT

MBSE come with its own challenges; both for IT department enabling the technology and the engineering teams using it. Throughout this whitepaper, we will address challenges and solutions to those two team challenges.

Perhaps the main challenge of MBSE is its relatively early stages of Technology Readiness Level as an overall technology. Scholars, universities, industries and practitioners work on envisioning and developing the technology. As MBSE functionalities develop, more capabilities are expected, this causes more expectations that requires more development in the technology. In parallel, digitalization (digital transformation) of product development, especially waterfall type of product development creates extra demand on MBSE and MBSE related technologies by the MBSE adopters. In addition, MBSE developers works on implementing new technologies on the IT space; such as database types, architectures and IoT.

One of the challenges of implementing MBSE in IT space is the dynamic scalability. Since MBSE grows exponentially, the storage and database for MBSE should be flexible and therefore dynamically scalable.

Therefore, you may be looking for virtually unlimited scalability, reliability, durability, interoperability, flexibility, and cost-effectivity for your MBSE solution.

MBSE does not work alone. It works in a complex and dynamic engineering environment. There are a wide variety of configurations that MBSE needs to support. It should be operable in a multitude of devices, software, APIs, endpoints, environments, engineering practices, mechanical sympathy, and others. The challenge is to put the MBSE at the center of engineering. This is referred as interoperability.

The next challenge is extending MBSE to the edge or, vice-versa, connecting the edge to the MBSE. With more and more devices are connected, there are more data and shadow devices required to build models. This is similar to Digital Twins. To keep the MBSE at the center of the "correct information”, the MBSE should reach the edge and other types of internal and external resources.

Another challenge is the data sovereignty and access management of model sharing since MBSE is to be used by multiple-suppliers distributed all around the world. Hence, granular access management and model sharing with minimum privileges are still a challenge of which failure poses security risks for MBSE practitioners.

Having MBSE at the center of processes and information in the product lifecycle, there would be other functionalities attached to MBSE. For example, Multi-Disciplinary Optimization (MDO) or Design Space Exploration (DSE) could all depend on MBSE.

The final challenge is the overall human hesitancy for the adoption of new technologies. MBSE shakes the existing practices of engineering for the good. However, like everything new, it has resistance. Therefore, MBSE needs to be flexible to adapt to the current engineering practices.

MBSE on-premises face extra challenges as IT challenges are added on the top of technological and organizational challenges mentioned above. MBSE requires considerable compute power, storage, wide variety of databases. It also needs to be flexible; hence, monolithic architecture approach would slow down the functionality of the MBSE tools in the long run.

Most of the time, MBSE users are not IT companies. Hence, IT infrastructure management, guessing capacities, planning for infrastructure retirement, keeping the infrastructure up-to-date, including extra technologies such as IoT, all yield more work and therefore, overhead costs.

Moreover, engineering teams practicing MBSE may discover more incompatibilities or missing functionalities as they use it over time. Hence, IT teams may need to work on these missing functionalities- or provide extra work-around solutions that create technical debt for their MBSE solution. Therefore, customers will work on finding simple, but versatile, solutions to start with an MBSE solution or solution built on MBSE.

In the next chapter, we first talk about how cloud would help MBSE and go beyond.