9 December 2024 -
On Monday 9 December 2024, Léa Kozak will be defending her doctoral thesis in amphitheatre A1 at ENSGSI. The thesis, funded by the Airbus Industrial Chair and co-directed by Eric Bonjour and Frédérique Mayer, is entitled:
Supporting the large-scale adoption of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), by developing a human-centered methodology for Lewinian Change Agents.
Aircraft manufacturers and other large industrial groups have to cope with the increasing complexity of the systems they design (e.g. aircraft), which often have long life cycles (over 20 years). Their competitive advantage depends on their ability to develop complex systems that can be manufactured and operated.
Over the last twenty years, the efforts of academic, industrial and national entities in the field of systems engineering (SE) have focused on model-based systems engineering (MBSE) with the aim of moving from a document-centric approach to one based on executable models.
The latter approach aims to provide metamodels, models and methods for the early verification and validation of system requirements and architectures, and to enable the generation of complete, consistent and relevant models and documents specifying and defining the system of interest and its supporting systems. The benefits of MBSE are numerous: detecting specification or design errors as early as possible (to reduce the cost of correcting errors), reusing models (to reduce project times), simulating the behaviour of the system of interest and generating virtual tests (to reduce the need for time-consuming and costly prototypes and physical tests).Initial feedback has emerged in recent years.So MBSE is not a futuristic concept or an invention waiting to be socialised before being recognised as an innovation in its own right. However, despite its potential, the MBSE is struggling to spread and has not yet broken through the barrier of adoption.
The aim of our research is not to describe or explain ‘from the outside’ the adoption of the MBSE for statistical purposes. Our work is based on the observation that the adoption of this innovation of means is slowing down in organisations, and to imagine solutions to overcome the barrier or wall of adoption.
In this context, our research aims to propose a human-centred methodology for a new role, Lewinian change agents (LCAs), to support the large-scale adoption of MBSE.The work carried out is divided into four contributions: (1) a conceptualisation of MBSE as an innovation of means targeting engineers as final adopters, (2) an in-depth diagnosis of the adherence of final adopters, (3) an extended CAE reading grid to identify the key constraints of TCO actors, (4) a methodology for LCAs based on agile and empathic methods.
Key words: MBSE, Innovation, Systems engineering, Change management, Adoption, Adhesion