Seamless Digital Engineering: A Grand Challenge Driven by Needs

What is it about?

The magic word in Digital Engineering - the vision of bringing together the engineering disciplines' tools, artifacts, knowledge and data into a coherent digital model - is "interoperability." But interoperability comes at great cost when the digital tools we use are not designed to work together, often requiring new tools, brittle configurations, and the creation of custom connectors. This paper proposes a grand challenge in Digital Engineering research by defining Seamless Digital Engineering and presenting architecture tenets that address core problems in Digital Engineering Ecosystems.

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Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Digital Engineering transformation efforts inside organizations are likely to use traditional information technology (IT) approaches of procuring software to solve integration problems. Caution is needed when adding more moving parts to a complex digital system, because it creates more points of potential failure and adds operational burdens to the organization. By envisioning Digital Engineering from a clean slate and applying a rigorous Model-Based Systems Engineering approach, we can potentially be our own customers and cut through the complexity of modern computing. Seamless Digital Engineering is a paradigm and grand challenge to focus such research.

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