Friday, March 30 at 12:00pm
Frank H.T. Rhodes Hall, 253
Those who design or manage large scale complex systems--such as the Mars orbiter, the Boeing 787, a global manufacturing system, a health care delivery system, or an energy production system--face many difficult challenges. Such problems involve many stakeholders with often conflicting concerns, and multiple disciplines with distinct points of view and technical issues. Simply describing the system requires overcoming often substantial semantic barriers. As these systems grow in scope, scale, and complexity, the contemporary document-based approaches are failing to adequately support the required knowledge and decision integration. Model Based Systems Engineering, or MBSE, is an approach to system development based on replacing traditional documents by formal and integrated models. MBSE is enabled by a new generation of system modeling languages, including OMG SysML, and holds great promise for dramatically improving communication, quality of decision making and system development costs. This talk will give a brief overview of MBSE and SysML, and describe several recent and current research projects that are directly addressing challenges in semantic modeling of systems, automating integration between different system models, and automating the integration of system models with analysis models. These projects span from classical engineering systems, to warehouses, to global supply chains.
Bio: Leon McGinnis is Professor Emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he leads the Model Based Systems Engineering Center within the Manufacturing Research Center, and continues to teach and lead research projects in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Tennenbaum Institute for Enterprise Transformation.