More Perspectives on the Shift-Left and the Comprehensive Digital Twin with Mike Crist and Scot Morrison – Part 1 – Transcript
The Industry Forward Podcast continued with another three part series on the intricacies of shifting-left with the comprehensive Digital Twin.
Dale and I will be talking with Mike Crist, Industry Strategist for Aerospace, Defense, and Transportation at Siemens Digital Industries Software, and, returning, Scot Morrison, Vice President of Shift-Left Software Product Management in the Hardware Assisted Verification Group at Siemens EDA. With Scot returning, the next three episodes are something of a companion to our previous conversation with Doug Burcicki and Scot. We will be getting a new perspective from Mike on some of the same topics as in that previous discussion, and covering some new topics around shifting left with the CDT.
In part one, we will revisit the major trends of the software-defined product revolution, talk about how shifting-left can help, and discuss the role of systems engineering practices. You can listen to the show through the player below or continue reading for a transcript of the conversation.
Conor Peick
Hello and welcome in to the Industry Forward Podcast with Dale Tutt. My name is Conor Peick and I am a writer for Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Thought Leadership team and your host for today’s podcast.
Dale Tutt
And I’m Dale Tutt, Vice President of the Industry Strategy Team at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Conor Peick
So it’s a new season of the Industry Forward Podcast. In this new series, we are going to be exploring the idea of shifting left with comprehensive digital twin and doing so with the help of several experts with decades of combined experience in automotive, aerospace, semiconductors, software and more.
Today, Dale and I will be talking with Mike Crist, Industry Strategist for Aerospace, Defense, and Transportation at Siemens Digital Industries Software, and, returning, Scot Morrison, Vice President of Shift-Left Software Product Management in the Hardware Assisted Verification Group at Siemens EDA. We are doing something of a companion episode to our last conversation with Doug and Scot, now getting a new perspective from Mike on some of the same topics, and some new topics around shifting left with the CDT. We will revisit the major trends of the software-defined product revolution and how shifting-left can help. Then we will look at the power of systems engineering, a specific look at SysML V2, changing product requirements, and the benefits of virtual testing in the face of growing product complexity. Thanks again for joining us and please enjoy!
Conor Peick
So welcome, Mike, and welcome back, Scot. Thanks again for joining us. You know, Mike, I was hoping you could just start us off with a brief introduction for the listeners covering your experiences in industry and kind of what you’re working on today with Siemens.
Mike Crist
Yeah, thanks. So I’m an industry strategist for the aerospace defense and transport industry. And what this means is I look broadly really across our customer base and things like industry consortia to identify new trends in the industry and then take that back as product features and improvements that we need to make to address some of those trends in the industry. Really, I’ve only been with Siemens for about four years now. Four years, two months and seven days to be exact, but I spent 16 years at Raytheon before that. And at Raytheon I did everything from circuit card design, FPGA design, to systems design for Electro optics and radar systems. And so now we see that. Taking that experience and some of the other tool standardization and technology standardization activities forward really helps us to drive that that understanding over the industry trends are.
Dale Tutt
Well, thank you, Mike and Scot for being here with us today. I’m looking forward again to this conversation, great conversation that we had with Doug and Scot in the previous episodes. And you know in those previous episodes we talked about how the automotive industry is undergoing this software-defined revolution. And not just the automotive industry, but we’re seeing it in other industries as well. I you know, sometimes joke that you know, we’re turning our cars into a smartphone, but there’s some truth to that. And we’re seeing that narrow space as well, I think. But what do you what are you seeing right now in the aerospace industry? Are you seeing similar trends or? So you maybe seeing some different things?
Mike Crist
So definitely we’ve heard from our US defense customers that they really want to get into the app development type of mindset. You want to take on this approach, similar to the cell phone where today you want to your radar to perform one function and tomorrow you want it to do something different. So download that app and now you got some new software on the radar. We see this a lot of this is driven by the acquisition strategy really. Where the defense services want to get away from this monolithic platform based approach of buying the whole product plus integration from a single supplier. And they may get to this modular approach where they say no, I’ve maybe I’ve got a plane that’s been in operation and the radar is busted. And I just want to go to the shelf in the in the warehouse, pull out a different radar, maybe from a different supplier, plug it in and have it work without any integration activity. And so. The fence space is certainly changing, but we also see this in the commercial aerospace changing some business model changes and other additional opportunities for business opportunities for software subscriptions are coming up. One of the most successful I think and most prominent and well written about is from GE Aerospace where the engine of the airplane is leased to the operator. And this lease program is maintained and operated by GE Aerospace. So as they gather telemetry on the engine. They can both offer the regularly scheduled maintenance, but maybe also some preventative maintenance of that engine before they’re even contacted for service.
Dale Tutt
Yeah. Thanks, Mike. And I agree with that. It’s I like what we’re seeing in both the commercial and defense aerospace there with the reliance on software and new business models. We talked a lot about the new business models in the previous episodes as well. So Scot, are you are you seeing anything on the aerospace side that, that that you’re? Any differences or maybe I should say any similarities or differences with automotive?
Scot Morrison
Well, certainly a lot of similarities with what Mike just said. You know, when we’re dealing with aerospace customers, they do want to continue to drive towards use of standards and not just at the protocol level so that they can have different suppliers for different subsystems within an aircraft. But also you know at the operating system level, you know they there’s a drive. Towards open source for instance, and that can also unlock the maintenance, you know which you know historically they’ve been, you know tied to a specific subsystem vendor for all activity. Is focused around maintenance, but you know by opening up these things and having a more standards based in different ways then that allows them to, you know, either compete those things or shift vendors and especially there’s a lot of dynamism in the market as well with you know acquisitions and changes and. Maybe even strategy and direction. So given the very, very long maintenance cycles in particular on aerospace, I mean this can allow them to you know to have more flexibility and I think we’re all familiar with, you know these very costly like avionic modernization programs that they would go through maybe every 20. Years on an airframe and you know that was a big, big undertaking. It had to be done kind of with everything kind of simultaneously, even cohesively. But you know, with a more modular approach then it can allow them to not do everything. You know, as one big kind of waterfall lockstep process. But update individual components at different times and that can be you know for new capabilities and features. You know, maybe they’re up against different types of threats within. Within the environment that they’re operating in, but it can also just kind of unlock more flexibility and spread out the cost and things like that. So definitely more standards based and kind of more flexible, not just development, but also maintenance strategies that they want to be able to adopt.
Conor Peick
What we’ve been trying to hit on here is, is why maybe companies are trying to adopt this sort of shift left approach and how they can they can do that with the comprehensive Digital Twin and other technologies. So I guess I’m feel like we’ve really set up the challenges and explored the. But you know Mike, I’m curious how does the shift left and comprehensive Digital Twin address these challenges that aerospace companies are dealing with today and you know what are the kind of the benefits they can expect?
Mike Crist
Well, so let’s build on that GE aerospace example. It’s one thing to just be able to gather statistics off of. Whatever the system is of interest, it’s a whole different thing to use those statistics to do predictive activities or to do other types of utility with that. With that information, that’s where that Digital Twin really comes in. Once I can take that reported performance or measured performance or current behavior of the system. And apply it to a Digital Twin. Now I can get more specific answers about that, that unique engine that I’m working on. And so with a Digital Twin of that engine, now I can start to maybe answer questions about whether or not it’s capable of performing a new mission or whether or not I need to perform an upgrade. Or suitability for a new regulation, or maybe add more functionality, or do part UPS lessons or add a variety of questions because I can take that unique information about that instance of the engine and apply it to the generic Digital Twin and know what that engine truly means. That’s where the Digital Twin comes in. Because the twin aspect is one thing in design. But once we get out into Operation Service maintenance takes on a life, a whole other life. So this is where we’re trying to get more of that virtual ship left to occur. So that we can have a Digital Twin that is more representative of the design. As the design matures to answer more questions for design and then later use it in these downstream activities.
Dale Tutt
I agree with you about the comprehensive Digital Twin and I think really when we think about the multi domain nature of most of this design effort that it’s electronics, hardware, software. And mechanical systems. That you have to have the comprehensive Digital Twin to really understand how that system operates, enough so that you can do that virtual verification. And I think that is really a critical part of this. But yeah, well, one thing that we, you know, we talked a lot about in the previous episodes about the co-development of hardware and software. The chips and the software at the same time. But one thing we really didn’t talk as much about was how systems engineering really enables that shift left. We talked a little bit about requirements and then the, the, the, the hardware testing and the software testing. So Scot, let’s kind of go back on that last from some of that last episode and think about how does the systems engineering really enable us to shift left and support the integration of those teams. The domains that can benefit from closer collaboration, you know within the multi domain optimization.
Scot Morrison
Yeah. I mean, there’s multiple different benefits to that. I mean, one, I think it was mentioned previously as well, it’s just to run all the variants, right. I think Mike was talking about the uniqueness of a single. Engine. And it’s not even just so much that, you know, these engines are different types of products to create at different rates and in different ways. But there’s a lot of customization. So each engine can be unique. You know each vehicle certainly can be unique in some ways and the variant analysis is one of the ways that kind of this system engine. During products and the development flows can manage that complexity so that you can, you know, have all the variants that are stored there and you can do analysis on them because there’s kind of an explosion and complexity. And when you kind of think combinatorial, all the different subsystem components or even lower level components you can have. And once again, that’s not even taken into account the fact that these things can wear and modify their behavior in different ways. So you get this tremendous, tremendous explosion really of variants and complexity and system analysis tools can help you track. That and manage that and test for that and test upgrades and things like that. Or develop even customized, you know maintenance intervals and different types of upgrades. And you know basically really handle that explosion of complexity.
Conor Peick
Hi there this is your host Conor one more time just to say thank you so much for listening to the Industry Forward Podcast with Dale Tutt. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and if you really enjoyed the show, maybe throwing us a rating and a review.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
