According to a 2013 study on systems engineering (SE) in industrial applications, future products will be smarter and more interconnected and feature complex, individually configurable functions [1].

At the same time competition for market share will increase time and cost pressures and raise standards in terms of product quality. One major challenge faced in future development processes is the ability to bring to market increasingly complex, high-quality products within ever shorter product life cycles.

This, in particular, raises the requirements in terms of interdisciplinary collaboration. In most cases, the individual disciplines do not cooperate and tend to carry out their work at different times, something that not only costs lots of time but also generally prevents multidisciplinary systems from being developed. Simulating and validating how the subsystems work together can only be done in a multidisciplinary environment. This is an area where interdisciplinary data management is crucial, but also one where the available data management solutions have shortcomings that are on display especially during the early stages of product development. There is also considerable room for improvement in terms of the methodological work being performed by R&D departments in the industrial sector.

This white paper from the Smart Systems Engineering (Smart SE) project group describes use cases and user requirements while also presenting initial thoughts regarding the necessary information objects and IT infrastructure. This will be further expanded on over the course of the project group’s future work, the results of which shall be published in a ProSTEP iViP Recommendation.