Date: 15 January 2014	Issue: 15
In This Issue

INCOSE International Workshop 2014

It’s that time of year again, when the systems engineering event we have all been looking forward to is finally around the corner.

The 2014 International Workshop is being held January 25-28 in Torrance, California. This event is essential for systems engineers interested in networking, exploring the challenges of various new sectors, and in making a difference in the future of the practice. The wide variety of working sessions will appeal to systems engineers from all backgrounds with all levels of experience.

In addition, all newly-elected board members, including Vitech President David Long as INCOSE President, will be officially inaugurated during the opening plenary of the International Workshop on Saturday morning.

Running concurrently will be the model-based systems engineering (MBSE) Workshop on Saturday and Sunday. This year’s workshop is themed “Infusing MBSE across Domains” and will examine the application of MBSE in different industry sectors, organizations, government, and academia. The agenda consists of presentations and break-out sessions. 

For more details, please visit the official website. 

Release the Power of the Model: MBSE Fundamentals Course

All systems experts are familiar with the cycle of planning, re-planning, analyzing, testing, and re-planning again. It is key to staying on top of an ever-changing set of requirements that reflect the dynamic environment of the customer. But with all of the documents, drawings, white boards, and notes on scratch paper it can be difficult to see the big picture. Transitioning to model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and leaving traditional, document-centric systems engineering far behind is the answer to making that big picture easier to view and manage.

Begin the paradigm-shift necessary to change how your organization does engineering with our newly-redesigned MBSE Tutorial. The agenda covers the topics essential to implementing an MBSE mindset in your organization in a format tailored specifically to your organization’s needs.

You Will Learn:

• The differences between traditional systems engineering and MBSE

•  The nature and power of the model

• Purpose of each of the four systems engineering domains, and how integrating them can bring your work to the next level

• How MBSE influences the major tasks of systems engineering

• Specific areas such as the system life cycle, views, and other supplemental topics

The course meets the needs of a wide range of students – from program managers to focused engineers to developers – and the instructors bring to the table a wealth of industry knowledge and experience to share the concepts in a way that enlighten, entertain, and inspire.

Contact Vitech today to get more information on how you can bring this course with rave reviews to your organization. 

CORE for Research is Shaping the Future of Systems Engineering

Each year, a select number of academic researchers and students are chosen to receive software grants through Vitech’s CORE for Research program. This program was initiated by Vitech to help change the systems engineering landscape by putting premier software in the hands of those who are working on the cutting-edge of engineering concepts.

Over the years of this program, grant recipients have been given access to the full version of CORE for use in their projects. Spanning from railroad network design to new defense planning approaches to space travel applications, PhD candidates and academic faculty have used CORE to design numerous industry-leading systems.

Christopher Bouch, a CORE for Research recipient at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, has used CORE for two major research efforts. First, he completed a project exploring possible change in the UK Railroad System, where he leveraged CORE's ability to model and simulate the effects of proposed changes without the commitment of extreme dollars, resources, and risks involved with other improvement methods.

“One of the key output benefits from the use of CORE has been its ability to trace the impact of innovative change on the existing system,” Bouch said.

Bouch’s latest projects are called Liveable Cities and iBUILD, which aim to develop the new engineering strategies necessary to facilitate liveable cities in the year 2050, and new business models to support the infrastructure of those cities. 

“I’m using CORE to support top-down development of the business model process, as well as middle-out modeling of the existing infrastructure systems that the new business models will have to interface with. CORE is great at helping me to marshal and integrate the data to produce effective system models,” Bouch said. 

We are always looking for new participants in our program! If you are an active PhD Candidate or academic faculty member who would like to know more about Vitech’s CORE for Research program, please contact Katie Thacker, University Program Manager, at kthacker@vitechcorp.com.

From the Archive: Exploring DoDAF and Other Architecture Frameworks in CORE

The CORE toolset includes a Systems Architecture schema developed to support the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) description. 

In this webinar Ron Kratzke discussed the origins of operational and system architecture principles and the overall approach taken by CORE to support development of operational architectures.

The presentation focuses on the organization of DoDAF – one of many architecture framework descriptions available in CORE – and methods for populating the CORE system architecture schema. If you missed the live presentation of this  webinar you have a chance to view it on-demand in the Webinar Archive.

The Importance of the Engineer

In the summer of 1928 a young medical researcher left his London lab to go on holiday. He was studying the staphylococci bacilli that are responsible for a number of nasty infections, including septicemia. As a part of his research, he cultivated the bacteria in cultures grown in Petri dishes.

As he left for vacation he, for whatever reason, did not place his cultures into sealed incubators but left them out on the exposed lab counters. In order to promote air circulation as an antidote to the summer heat, the researcher routinely kept his lab door open. Nearby was a stairwell that led down to the floor below where a mycology lab was cultivating molds for study. More...

Today's Tip: Hiding Diagram Content (Eliding in SysML Terminology)

Sometimes comprehensive and complete diagrams can complicate communication. CORE leverages the SysML concept of eliding content, more commonly known as selectively hiding / showing content. Users can select specific nodes on a diagram and then toggle them to show or hide information. Users can also control the current display mode of the diagram, showing all content, marking or hiding content, as desired. This capability allows CORE to deliver comprehensive, complete, correct representations from the underlying model without sacrificing communication. This feature makes it very easy to bring focus to the areas of interest without having to manage and synchronize separate artifacts.