Stephen Watts

TOPIC: THE ENABLING ROLE OF CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT FOR THE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING OF TOMORROW’S COMPLEX SYSTEMS AND SYSTEMS OF SYSTEMS (STEPHEN WATTS, ADRIANA D’SOUZA, DR MARIO KOSSMANN)

  

Times to market for complex Systems and Systems of Systems (SoS) in the aerospace and defense industries shall be reduced, whereas both customer expectations and technology evolutions are increasing at an exponential rate. As the total life cycle of complex Systems and SoS frequently spans across several decades, the customer expectations and market conditions are highly likely to evolve, thus their development needs to be kept in line with evolving business cases. Systems Engineering (SE) and Configuration Management (CM) need to work even more closely together in order to address this. CM as a discipline is essential for this as the key discipline for establishing traceability and controlling baseline evolutions and iterations between all the relevant pieces of information resulting from the related system lifecycle processes. This work provides an outlook on how CM may enable SE of tomorrow’s complex Systems and SoS, including some key recommendations and related challenges.

Stephen Watts Is aircraft configuration management specialist and qualified CMII Professional with a post-graduate Certificate in Management from the University of Lancaster (UK). He has almost 40 years of industrial experience (many years of which in the aerospace and defense sectors) in a range of engineering fields such as conceptual design (electronics, electro-mechanical), work-package management and configuration management, both in specialist and leadership roles.

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