SSE Meeting 39

Attendees

John Davies, Simon Wright, Andrew Farncombe, Sarwar Ahmad, Neil Hunter.

New INCOSE UK Website

The new website and utilities have been tested.

The new website allows the group admin to:

• send emails out to all members of the group - replacing the e-mailer system that had to go via dot-the-eye
• send emails to a closed list of people who are not members of the group
• post and remove documents linked to the website
• provide a 'discussion' facility for members to discuss issues/ make people aware of items etc.
• set up and manage members and administrators.

These have been trialled using a 'Working from Home' project. Several faults were found and fixed by dot-the-eye.

Working from Home

As this applied to everyone, a trial to specify a Working From Home 'Service', capture a structure and identify issues was started using the INCOSE facilities for developing, updating, commenting etc. This lasted a month but did not attract much input, so was abandoned.

Relationship of SSE to MBSE

JD attended a number of seminars given by the MBSE working group and a MBSE Working Group Meeting. 'Services' are not part of the basic MBSE approach, but like other areas they can/could be developed and work with the standard structure developed for MBSE. This would require the basic Service Definition map to be tailored and augmented to provide an ontology for services. Similar approaches have been used in other areas such as Safety Engineering. There is an issue about developing new areas from scratch, without taking into account existing standards.

INCOSE Meetings

JD presented the work of the Service Systems Engineering group to the UKAB on 6th October. It went fairly well, but the lack of interaction between the speaker and audience was noted. This was partly due to the use of remote meeting capability, and the speaker's style of trying to involve the audience.

Archimate

The use of Archimate for modelling services was discussed. The following emerged:

• it has not been used within the Group, but some group members use it or are involved in programmes where it is used. It was raised at the UKAB presentation.
• it was developed by The Open Group and links to ToGAF methodology
• its terminology is more directed at services than SysML
• SysML is losing favour in many Systems Engineering activities
• the available entities are better suited to services
• it is being widely used.

It was agreed to do further investigation, possibly into a comparison with use of SysML.

Work for next meeting

• JD to attend Group Chairs meeting on 19th November and report on views of ASEC2020 if possible
• SW to investigate use of Archimate and liaise with SA
• NH to produce Strawman for presenting SSE activity/outputs

Date of next meeting

11th January 2021, via Webex 14:00 to 16:00.