Evolving Beyond MBSE to Tackle Aerospace Complexity – Transcript
In the latest episode of Talking Aerospace Today, Todd Tuthill and Dale Tutt begin their exploration of the need for digital transformation of systems engineering for aerospace and defense. They start by looking at the history of systems engineering in the industry and how changes in A&D today necessitate a change.
Patty Russo: Greetings, and welcome to Talking Aerospace Today from Siemens Digital Industries Software. I’m Patty Russo and I’m responsible for global aerospace and defense marketing here at Siemens and your host for the podcast. Today, we’re beginning a new series on a topic that’s more important than ever for many industries, but especially for the aerospace and defense industry, and that’s systems engineering. The delivery of complex aircraft and spacecraft has in so many ways relied on systems engineering for years, but with software-driven components, connectivity between systems, autonomous controls, the addition of electronics and other smart and remote features that are now ubiquitous, continued complexity is the norm.
Patty Russo: For decades, the accepted model based systems engineering practices focused on models as an essential tool to design and manage complex systems, but when we now add the scope and complexity that we talked about just now, delivering on the promise of cross domain integration and interoperability of systems cross the board has far exceeded the initial promise of MBSE. So we’ve reached this pivot point. Digital transformation of systems engineering is absolutely necessary across the industry. The good news is that advances in technology and approaches will help address such complexities, and we are excited to talk about it all. I hope you are too. So let’s welcome back our regular contributor, Todd Tuthill, Vice President of Aerospace, Defense, and Marine for Siemens Digital Industries Software. Welcome, Todd.
Todd Tuthill: Hey Patty, great to be here. And do you mean we get to spend some time today talking about rockets and space and satellites? Really? That’s what we get to do. I can’t wait. This is going to be so much fun.
Patty Russo: Indeed we do. Yeah. It’s going to be, I think this is going to be a good series. I’m looking forward to it. And for a cameo, returning to our podcast is guest Dale Tutt, Vice President of Industry Strategy here at Siemens. Dale’s will be a familiar voice for listeners who have been around for a while. Welcome back, Dale.
Dale Tutt: Hey, thank you Patty for having me today. I, and it’s really great to be back. It’s, I think we started here and it’s like old home week for me so, and I love it, any chance I get to talk about airplanes and space and rockets and cool things like that I just always enjoy coming back and having those conversations. I’m looking forward to today’s conversation.
Todd Tuthill: Well, Dale you’re always welcome to talk, come talk to us about aerospace. Anytime you want to.
Dale Tutt: Alright. Well, maybe we’ll just make this a weekly appearance.
Todd Tuthill: Open invitation.
Patty Russo: Alright, so I’m going to start with a question for Dale. I’m curious from your perspective what you see happening in the space sector specifically that is or will have an impact on the broader aerospace and defense and space industry.
Dale Tutt: You know, it’s kind of amazing what’s going on right now. The amount of startups that we see and the amount of innovation. It really has been, has just been to me has been dramatic and I don’t know really how else to say that. I mean, I think about a company like SpaceX. It was a startup company in the past and now they’re like the major player in terms of launching satellites and other, launching other things into orbit. It’s, 20 years ago, people would say, “Well, there okay, that’s a startup and they can’t really compete with the big established players,” and look at what they’ve done. And you continue that with companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and others that are also very, kind of major players now are getting to be major players in space.
Dale Tutt: But then just even the small satellites and the number of applications and I, just the amount of innovation, it really just continues to accelerate I think in terms of space. I was in a conversation yesterday with some folks and the companies that are developing new rocket engines and new satellites and new satellite technology and new material systems. It’s just, I would argue that if we were still relying on kind of the older models of the past that were largely government driven, that we would probably not see the level of innovation that we’re having today. And so, that clearly has an impact on the space industry because I think that’s it’s opening up access to space for so many more people than what we’ve had in the past.
Dale Tutt: But I also think you we see the same thing in the broader A&D industry, that we see that same level of innovation and many of the same challenges that these companies are having. And so where you’re seeing, domains that used to be dominated by government agencies in the past, they’re really now being dominated by startup companies and major players and major investors like that. So it’s a fun time to be in space. It’s a fun time if you’re a rocket scientist, and since I guess I started out in rockets, I get to declare myself a rocket scientist. So. It’s a good time to be in the aerospace industry.
Todd Tuthill: Yeah, it’s democratized access. That’s what comes to mind. You know, like you said, it used to be you had to be government to fly in space.
Dale Tutt: Yeah.
Patty Russo: Yep, the more players mean more collaboration, more need for visibility, more need for connectivity across the board. Which is I think, at the heart of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about systems engineering. And I’m going to jump to the next question, building on that. And this question is for Todd. Describe, if you could, at a high level, what systems engineering is, and the history of addressing systems engineering in the A&D, and we’re not looking for the detailed deep dive, but we’re looking kind of that high level. Let’s kind of level set on what systems engineering is.
Todd Tuthill: So I’m going to go back to my favorite one of my favorite all time movies. Todd’s opinion, if you’re an aerospace engineer and Apollo 13 is not one of the best movies you’ve ever seen, I question whether you’re really an aerospace engineer. And I got to see that movie for like the 112th time, I think, recently. And I go back to that because when you think about the origins of systems engineering and aerospace, it really starts with the Apollo program. You back to the 60s and you think about the monumental tasks that those people accomplished. And up to the 60s when you thought about engineering and specifically aerospace engineering, you thought about somebody that designed something physical.
Todd Tuthill: I designed the propulsion, I designed the electrical system, I designed the mechanical system, and that’s really what you thought of as engineering. And I think as part of the Apollo program, you know as a nation, as a country, I don’t know that we’ve taken on an aerospace project nearly that grand. And throughout that project, the people at NASA realized we need another type of engineering, a higher level type of engineering to integrate that, to bring that together, to put those things together so that you can accomplish a broader purpose. And that’s really the origin of systems engineering, this idea of taking complexity and breaking it down into pieces so that the individual pieces can be designed, and then putting it all back together in the end so that you can accomplish a broader purpose.
Todd Tuthill: So that’s really the origins of systems engineering as far as I know in aerospace. It was the Apollo program, and it has progressed since then. Now we’re going to get into it in terms of tools and methods that were used. A lot of it was organizational, a lot of it was paper based, but it was really the origins of systems engineering and that really set us off I think and the whole industry in a good place to do that kind of broad, amazing work that we accomplished through the Apollo program.
Patty Russo: And as we mentioned in the intro, it kind of ties to my next question about the history. Systems engineering today is a hot topic and I think looking back at the Apollo program is, I think, a great way to tee up this next question, because status quo for systems engineering development is no longer an option. Success going forward is going to require that we rethink our approach and that we evolve systems engineering processes beyond what we’ve done before, beyond that isolated system modeling tool, beyond looking at it through individual silos. So why is that, Todd? And why is digital transformation of this area so, in such critical state and critically needed today?
Todd Tuthill: Okay, I’m going to go right back to Apollo 13 to my absolute favorite scene in the movie. You know, fans of this podcast, I’m sure, have watched it. If not, pause the podcast, go to Netflix. Watch it right now. It’s an incredible movie. But my favorite scene is when they’re in the capsule and they moved over to the LEM and there’s three of them breathing oxygen in an area where two of them are supposed to breathe it and the carbon dioxide is going up. And they say, “Well, no problem. Just replace the filter.” Well, the problem is they have a square filter in one capsule and a round filter in the other. And obviously when, we talked about the good things, systems engineering had started on the Apollo program, but they missed that. They had two things that essentially supply the same purpose, but nobody considered the fact that I might want to intermix them.
Todd Tuthill: That was not a requirement that anybody put together, and when you think about silos, to me that’s a great example of a silo in the design of that particular spacecraft. The two kinds of filters, you know, a round one and a square one. And you multiply that till today. I talked earlier about the different disciplines of engineering, the mechanical, the electrical, we now have software, we have electronics and you have all these silos. And the reason that digital transformation is so important, the reason the systems engineering is so important is that we want to design a spacecraft or a rocket or a satellite.
Todd Tuthill: We don’t want to design the just the rocket engine or just the structure or just the wing of the aircraft. We want to design all those things, and those things are what we call mechatronics, and they involve all these different disciplines. And the most efficient way from A to B is for all those disciplines to communicate freely, to share information, to have a single source of truth, to have a common shared purpose, to know, because we talk about the why, the what and the how of engineering, and you need that why, what, and how to be kind of originating and driven by a higher portion of engineering, and that’s systems engineering.
Todd Tuthill: So that the mechanical engineers, when they’re thinking about the mechanical design are just as tuned in to the electrical and the software engineering, because any aspect of an aircraft or spacecraft, when you change one discipline, one piece of it, you change everything. And you want to get to that optimal way of designing that overall project. That’s systems engineering, and you want to, and it involves massive amounts of data and massive models, and that’s much more efficiently done through digital means and digital tools.
Patty Russo: So it sounds like even the name model-based systems engineering or MBSE that we’ve used for what now 20 plus years is, I don’t want to say old school, or becoming obsolete. We need to rethink how we’re even talking about systems engineering is what I think I heard you say.
Todd Tuthill: I’ll go on record and say I thoroughly dislike the name model-based systems engineering. I think I don’t, you know, internally and Siemens and people who know me know that I think that’s a very narrow term. I don’t use it unless I have to. I think about the digital transformation of systems engineering across the life cycle, which I guess the marketing people don’t like because it’s too many words. MBSE rolls off the tongue faster. But yeah, I think you’re right. That this idea that it’s just a matter of, I have a model to do systems engineering. It’s not one model. It’s many models in a connected system of models and digital tools. But yeah, it’s much broader than just a model doing systems engineering. That’s correct.
Dale Tutt: Yeah, I was going to say if I can add to that a little bit, I have to agree with Todd. I mean, I think that sometimes it’s systems engineering models, model-based systems engineering, people just look at it as creating a few models and you solve your problem. But it’s really an integrated solution when you think about systems engineering in a broader context. It’s how is it integrated with the simulation models and how is it integrated with other parametric models that you may have for, say, manufacturing, or costing, or whatever you may have?
Dale Tutt: It’s an aggregation of a lot of different solutions, but it’s about being able to operate in a multi-domain way, that it’s you’re codeveloping electronics, software, electrical, mechanical. You’re doing all of this at the same time. Model-based systems engineering or, I think the reason I don’t like that is because a lot of times people just think of it as system modeling and it’s really just a small part of the very bigger process and it really kind of forgets that you have, the problem is much bigger than just doing a system model. So, and I think that’s why digital transformation is so critical to be able to operate multi domain.
Patty Russo: And what I think I hear you saying is that the approach needs to look at the entire product and product development, product lifecycle holistically.
Dale Tutt: Yeah, absolutely. I think, it’s when you, when you think about your product, you have to think about how you’re going to design it. So it’s easy for people to put these things in a serial process. I’m going to design it and I’m going to test it and then I’m going to build it and then I’m going to deliver it. And the reality is, is that you start building it, you start the manufacturing process when you start to come up with the idea in the first place, because that’s going to be the first question you have to ask, is “Well, how am I going to build it?”
Dale Tutt: If you’re building 500,000 cars a year and you’re going to put a lot of automation into it, it’s a different manufacturing problem. And if you’re going to build 25 satellites a year or something. So really I think you have to think holistically. Today, the successful products today, they don’t operate in this serial design, build, deliver fashion. They operate very much, you have to have design for manufacturability, design for sustainability, design for maintainability, etc. throughout the entire process. And these processes are life ycle processes and a lot of fuzziness between them.
Patty Russo: Dale, you raised a great point that will be best served in a deeper dive discussion, but we’re out of time today, so let’s pause here and pick this up next time. Thank you Todd and Dale for your insights today, and thank you to our listeners for joining us. We’ll be back soon with more conversations on systems engineering in aerospace and defense. I’m your host, Patty Russo, and we’ll see you next time on Talking Aerospace Today.
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