Presentations

• STPA Analysis of Automotive Safety Using Arcadia and Capella This presentation demonstrates the use of the Arcadia methodology and the open source Capella tool to implement a STPA-based analysis technique that augments the conventional HARA, HAZOP. The STPA approach extends the conventional methods to include a holistic perspective considering hardware, software, humans, and control failures in a balanced manner.

  Delivered by David Hetherington and Pascal Roques at the ERTS 2022 conference in Toulouse, France on 1 June 2022.

• Modular Trade Studies with SysML Simulation Trade studies are a key activity for systems engineers. We would like to compare different subsystem options, preferably with some level of simulation. Ideally we would like to model a system and dynamically couple it to two or more different subsystem models, simulating the overall system to evaluate the attractiveness of each subsystem for the application at hand.

  Unfortunately, SysML itself does not elaborate a robust dynamic interface concept that would be comparable to a dynamic link library in software. The tool suppliers themselves provide little or no guidance on how one might go about such a dynamic comparison of multiple options.

  However, it turns out there is a straightforward way to do exactly this sort of dynamic option compare. The approach is subtle but works well in both Cameo Systems Modeler and IBM Rhapsody. This presentation explains the approach for creating the models and for running the simulation with demonstrations of running simulations in both tools.

  Delivered by David Hetherington on 18 September 2021 at the 2021 INCOSE Western States Regional Conference (WSRC) in San Diego, California

• Requirements Management for Safety-Critical Products Managing requirements is a key product management activity. For many products this process is quite informal. The product manager has a lot of talks with stakeholders, perhaps creates a spreadsheet or two, and maybe puts a few things into JIRA. This sort of casual process is not acceptable f or products where users can die a fiery death if the product doesn't work properly. Not only that, such safety critical products can be incredibly complex, with tens of thousands of requirements, dozens of suppliers, and large numbers of moving parts and software pieces. This talk gave a quick overview of the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Systems Modeling Language (SysML) tools and techniques that makers of such products use to get the complexity under control and insure airtight end-to-end accountability.

  Delivered by David Hetherington at the 24th Product Camp Austin on February 22, 2020.

Updated 5 July 2022