In an ultra-competitive world, price would be the only competitive aspect for people stuck with incremental product manufacturing creativity and brutal negotiation with suppliers. For all others, it is about innovation and invention.
New capabilities can be accomplished with innovative system design, brute force engineering or complete overhaul. An innovative system design requires a mechanism and infrastructure that supports rapid prototyping, quick and extensive trade off, and the ability to share across teams with different expertise and requirements.
Standards such as UML are used for system specification but, they have gotten extremely complicated for any one that is not a modeler. With creative enhancements and simulation infrastructure, UML can be used for system design and experimentation. Unfortunately current versions of UML are focused on software development, and documentation.
At Mirabilis Design, we are constantly researching on better approaches to team work and new product architecture. We have found that SysML has merits in defining embedded systems but the language is limited to the outer shell of behavior. Our research has led us to Enhanced SysML which uses the same views of SysML but adds specific constructs, simulator and dynamic execution document generator. This graphical solution is made up of a standard graphical block diagram editor with about 15 icons. Icons define tasks, traffic, analysis, resources or behaviours. Based on the icon definition, the details would vary- behaviour would be tied to a RegEx language while resources would include timing and power consumption. For example, an icon defined as a processor would have parameters to express the clock speed and scheduling algorithm. Underlying the graphical user interface is an extremely high-performance simulator that can conduct trade studies to evaluate concurrent behaviours, determine bottlenecks, measurement the power consumed and the response time. The system is broken down into four parts- traffic, behaviour, architecture and mapping.
This alternate approach to SysML provides early visibility into timing, resource consumption, and bottlenecks. It can be used, with great accuracy, to estimate Bill of materials, costs, project schedule, and provide early dynamic marketing material. The breath of modelling and simulation available with this approach provides visibility into the operation of the system over a multitude of use-cases. Once the feasibility has been confirmed, the product marketing engineer can hand this off to the Architects. The Architects can add details to the same virtual prototype and get a far more accurate system definition.
This approach begins at marketing, acquires customer validation and then goes into product development. With this approach, company need not wait for first prototypes to get proof. Also the continuous enhancement means that there are no disjoints in the design process. As a result, the whole organization could work together to create a great product. Simultaneously, a single concept to specification platform can be used for requirements, definition, validation, marketing and customer debugging.