An offshoot of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Digital Engineering’s goal is to accelerate the development of complex products, systems, and sub-systems by overcoming the established engineering disciplines, while addressing each engineering problem.
Theoretically, Digital Engineering can be applied anywhere product engineers want to make the product development process more agile and responsive to market demands.
But, in reality, by far the most consequential force behind creation and widespread adoption of Digital Engineering is the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).
In Fact, in 2018, the DoD announced its Digital Engineering Strategy. And, in doing so, the DoD announced that “the strategy promotes the use of digital representations of systems and components and the use of digital artifacts to design and sustain national defense systems.”
The DoD also announced its five strategic goals for digital engineering:
- Formalize the development, integration, and use of models to inform enterprise and program decision-making
- Provide an enduring, authoritative source of truth
- Incorporate technological innovation to improve the engineering practice
- Establish a supporting infrastructure and environment to perform activities, collaborate and communicate across stakeholders
- Transform the culture and workforce to adopt and support digital engineering across the lifecycle
What this means is that every company who supplies products or develops systems with a department, agency, or unit of the DoD is today required to be aware of and incorporate digital engineering into its development processes for the lifecycle of the products and systems they create and/or acquire for the DoD.
Analysts believe that for the DoD and all its branches of the military, the Digital Engineering Strategy is very important. It has already led to greater efficiency and improved quality of all acquisition activities, making it easier than ever before to make informed decisions that save lives on day one when implementing new technology into weapons deployment or logistics chains.
Also significant is how the Digital Engineering Strategy created a more uniform standard that allows those partner companies to optimize their own capabilities to fulfill and over-deliver on new products and systems with expertise, agility, and advanced resources.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers Digital Engineering Training | MBSE Fundamentals for DoD, a 3-day course designed for modelers, systems engineers, hardware and software design engineers, managers, acquisition professionals, and employees with little or no Digital Engineering/MBSE experience.
The course is also useful for those who have experience with Digital Engineering/MBSE but have never had any formal training.
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.