The SmartSE project concluded the fourth phase of the project  last year with the presentation of a third, revised version of the Smart Systems Engineering recommendation. It is available free of charge at www.prostep.org/mediathek/veroeffentlichungen. This means that project has now entered the fifth phase, which involves expanding the focus from bidirectional collaboration with two partners to include collaborative development with multiple partners while at the same time addressing new topics such as the compatibility of systems engineering and agile methods.

The focus of the work performed in this fifth phase of the project also includes the development of best practices for simulation-based systems engineering in collaborative development processes, which benefits all the partners. An initial concrete result is the best practices for the SSP (System Structure and Parameterization) standard, which has been available since the middle of last year and which the project group has described in a white paper. It makes it possible to exchange not only individual simulation models but also interlinked models and parameter structures across companies and between different tools.

Now that the government-funded SET Level project for the verification and validation of highly-automated driving functions has been completed, the Credible Simulation Process Framework defined as part of the project has been handed over to the SmartSE project group. The challenge now is to expand the processes in a way that ensures the execution and traceability of the simulations and the simulation results throughout the supply chain. This requires, among other things, expanding the SSP standard to include the mapping of standardized simulation processes (SSP traceability).

During the course of the current year, the SmartSE project group will continue to develop best practices for simulation-based systems engineering in cross-enterprise development processes involving multiple partners. Core topics for the various work packages include a reliable simulation process and the harmonization of metadata to ensure the quality of the simulation, the handling of different modeling and abstraction approaches when using simulations, the combination of systems engineering and agile methods, and expanding the V-model to include information relevant to standards, engineering artifacts and development approaches.

"SmartSE celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, making it one of the longest-lived and most successful projects in the prostep ivip Association. The active participation of 26 global companies, some of which also took part in the workshops held on site in Darmstadt, shows that the project and the topics it is addressing are still in line with industry's current needs."

"We would like to see this active participation continue with fruitful discussions on the focal issues we are addressing in phase five of the project. For example, the interesting question of how we evaluate the quality of simulation results, how we deal with different levels of abstraction in simulation and how a balance between the V-model and agile methods can be achieved."