A modern car, factory line or medical device is no longer just a physical system — it is a computer wrapped in metal, connected to a network. That connection is a feature and a threat: every link is a way in. Designing safe and secure cyber-physical systems means engineering safety and security together from the…
There is a brutal economics to verification: a defect caught at a desk costs a dollar, the same defect caught at system test costs a hundred, and caught after delivery it can cost ten thousand. For decades the V-model pushed most testing to the right-hand, late side of the project. Shift-left verification flips that —…
Writing good requirements is slow, careful work — and reviewing hundreds of them for ambiguity, conflicts and gaps is the kind of task humans do badly when tired. Large language models are unexpectedly good at exactly this. Used well, an LLM can draft requirements from rough notes, check them against quality rules, flag conflicts, and…
If MBSE is about building a model instead of documents, digital engineering is the bigger idea it lives inside. Digital engineering is an integrated approach that uses authoritative digital models and data across a system’s entire lifecycle and every discipline — not just systems engineering, but design, simulation, manufacturing, cost, supply chain and operations —…
On a complex programme, the “truth” about the system is scattered — requirements in one tool, the design model in another, test results in a third, operational data somewhere else entirely. Ask “what does this change affect?” and you are in for a day of detective work. The digital thread is the fix: a connected…
Building a system model in SysML is powerful — and slow. Every part, every connection, every requirement link is placed by hand, and keeping a large model consistent as it changes is more than most teams can stay on top of. AI is starting to change that. The most useful AI in MBSE is not…
At some point a project has to stop arguing about what the requirements are and agree: this is the set we are building. That agreed, frozen snapshot is the baseline. A requirements baseline is a formally reviewed and agreed set of requirements that becomes the reference point for design, development, and change control. Without a…
“The system should be user-friendly” is not a requirement — it is a wish wearing a requirement’s clothes. You cannot build it, test it, or prove you met it. SMART requirements fix that by demanding every requirement be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound — five tests that turn a vague hope into something an…
Two machines do the same job. One runs for years; the other is in the workshop every other week. Same function, wildly different value — and the difference has a name. RAM stands for Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability: the three properties that decide whether a system can be depended on over its working life. Reliability…
Here is a system that passed every test and still failed. It did exactly what the spec said — calculated the right numbers, returned the right answers — and was unusable, because it took eleven seconds to respond and fell over under ten users. Every functional requirement was met. The non-functional ones were never written…
