Embedded systems omnipresent in everyday life and industry are mainly composed of hardware and software that must comply with a number of standards and regulations. However, there is no consensus on the quality characteristics and subcharacteristics of embedded software. This article presents the steps for modeling an operational quality model for embedded software aligned with the ISO 25000 series of quality models for traditional computer systems. From a literature review composed of 40 studies on quality modeling for embedded systems and software, 85 of the most frequent quality characteristics and subcharacteristics were first identified, including a subset of 16 referenced or cited in at least 25% of the literature. Next, the design of a quality model for embedded software aligned with the ISO 25000 series was proposed with 13 characteristics and 27 subcharacteristics. The operational aspect of this quality model for embedded software is addressed next through a set of measures and measurement functions from ISO 25000 to aggregate the results of the quantification of the characteristics and subcharacteristics. A survey involving 25 embedded software specialists is presented next to gauge, using Fleiss's Kappa criteria, their agreement with the proposed quality model. Furthermore, the computed importance weights derived from the survey participants' individual opinions were compared with those derived from an analysis of 40 embedded software studies, bolstering the credibility of the model. The results of this study suggest that the proposed quality model can serve as a framework for evaluating and understanding the quality characteristics across diverse expertise levels. Furthermore, the convergence between the survey and the literature strengthens the model's credibility by anchoring it in both established literature and practitioners' agreements.

In order to reduce time and costs, while maintaining a high level of product quality, effective implementation of systems engineering processes may be beneficial for small and medium-sized enterprises. However, applying a prescriptive generic system engineering standard in the enterprise, without any consideration of the company's organisation, background and context, is inappropriate. Moreover, due to severe resource limitations, the difficulties in following and complying with a standard are even more obvious in SMEs. In this context, this paper explores a framework to help SMEs evaluate the maturity of processes, promote a progressive deployment and standardisation of their engineering processes to manage manufacturing projects, based on the experience and practices underway in SMEs and with reference to international systems engineering standards. Our proposal is to stand by companies to help them evolve their engineering processes by progressively aligning them with systems engineering standards without disrupting the overall organisation and practices of the company.

The development of driver assistance and autonomous driving systems for vehicles has started to revolutionize the transportation sector, offering comfort and safety. While significant technological progress has already been made in this area, the road ahead is littered with many challenges. Among these challenges, ensuring driver safety has become even more critical due to the increasing use of complex, communicating and reconfigurable embedded software. Current approaches to document-based safety analysis have reached their limit and the time has come to rethink them. To this end, we propose to rely on model-driven engineering to conduct safety analyses. This paper makes a methodological proposal that improves current practices in terms of time, analysis quality and reusability, and that has been validated on the study of an automotive software component.

L'avenement des vehicules autonomes a ete longtemps percu comme un evenement qui allait revolutionner le monde du transport, ameliorer le confort et la securite des usagers. Bien que cet optimisme soit partage par la plupart et que d'importants progres technologiques aient ete fait dans ce sens, le chemin ne reste pas pour le moins jonche de nombreux defis, notamment celui de la securite, liee a l'utilisation croissante de logiciels embarques devenus tres complexes. Face a cette complexite grandissante, les methodes manuelles traditionnelles d'analyse de la securite basees sur des documents ont atteint leur limite et il est temps de repenser les approches. Nous proposons pour cela de nous appuyer sur l'ingenierie dirigee par les modeles pour mener les analyses de securite non plus directement a partir des documents de conception mais d'un modele de l'architecture du logiciel embarque. Nous faisons en ce sens une proposition methodologique, qui, validee sur l'etude d'un composant logiciel automobile, ameliore les pratiques actuelles en temps, en qualite des analyses et en reutilisation.

In order to lead successful projects, coordinating the different business units of a company is compulsory. This paper proposes a framework to make companies' practices evolve toward a better alignment of the business units based on their processes, and illustrates it with project management and systems engineering processes. Indeed, all the different organization units intend to serve the common global objective to satisfy the customer needs, and need to closely collaborate during projects. However, work organization in companies often leads to barriers between these stakeholders, with the result of an incoherent decision-making that may compromise project execution. Therefore, the issue of processes alignment from different domains lies at the very heart of ongoing research topics and ranks first among economic and industrial concerns. This paper uses a qualitative approach to show how different business units' processes can be integrated and illustrate this framework by aligning the systems engineering and project management processes within a certain engineering project context. By using the proposed framework, different teams (or even different companies, in a context of distributed enterprise) can align their practices, while also making them evolve toward a better compliance with standards.

With autonomous driving, vehicles are undergoing tremendous and multiple innovations in a variety of areas of automotive expertise. In particular, the amount of software used in embedded safety-critical systems is increasing at a rapid rate to implement new features. It is therefore essential today to guarantee the safety of software by carrying out safety analyses in accordance with automotive standards. These analyses allow engineers assessing the design with regard to safety and to determine the modifications if needed to meet safety objectives. However, the traditional approach to perform these analyses is cumbersome and limited when faced with the complexity of today's automotive software architectures. Safety analyses are currently performed manually, and the results are dependent on the experience of the safety expert. As a result, they are highly subjective and are not guaranteed to be exhaustive and error-free. To overcome these issues, this paper explores the use of a model-based safety approach in the context of safety-critical automotive embedded software. It makes a methodological proposal that relies on the software architecture model to build a dedicated safety model from which safety analyses can be automatically derived. The method is experimented on an automotive case study, an embedded software that assists the driver in following the lane.

The autonomy of intelligent systems and their safety rely on their ability for local decision making based on collected environmental information. This is even more for cyber-physical systems running safety critical activities. While this intelligence is partial and fragmented, and cognitive techniques are of limited maturity, the decision function must produce results whose validity and scope must be weighted in light of the underlying assumptions, unavoidable uncertainty and hypothetical safety limitation. Besides the cognitive techniques dependability, it is about the assurance level of the decision self-making. Beyond the pure decision-making capabilities of the autonomous intelligent system, we need techniques that guarantee the system assurance required for the intended use. Security mechanisms for cognitive systems may be consequently tightly intricated. We propose a trustworthiness module which is part of the system and its resulting safety. In this paper, we briefly review the state of the art regarding the dependability of cognitive techniques, the assurance level definition in this context, and related engineering practices. We elaborate regarding the design of autonomous intelligent systems safety, then we discuss its security design and approaches for the mitigation of safety violations by the cognitive functions.

Complex industrial systems are increasingly software driven, rapidly evolving into autonomous, self-adaptive processing at industrial field. Artificial intelligence technologies are spreading fast at industrial Edge, improving the industrial operations efficiency. However Edge computing systems involving artificial intelligence must also continuously ensure the safe operations. This paper assesses the state of the art of cognitive technologies with their relevance for artificial intelligence implementation at industrial safety critical systems. It introduces then a state of the art for artificial intelligence safety assurance practices. Implementation at the industrial application stack is illustrated with the edge virtual operating system that operates the industrial fog. Edge operating system is evolving fast as kind of an AI intensive software. Industrial developments are illustrated with Slap OS, real case examples of swarm computing and advanced robotic.

Project performance measurement offers a wide range of methods to help project managers monitor projects. However, several critical issues remain in project performance measurement, such as an unbalanced use of indicators due to a lack of prediction-based (leading) indicators with regard to outcome-based (lagging) indicators. For its part, systems engineering measurement, although a more recent discipline, offers a wide variety of indicators, including a set of leading indicators. As our objective is to increase project performance and success rates, this involves improving project performance measurement on which project management decisions are based. This purpose, the proposal put forward in this paper is to extend the number and type of indicators used in project performance measurement by adapting the leading indicators defined in systems engineering measurement. The methodology involves first mapping the systems engineering indicators with the project management activities, resulting in identification of a set of potentially useful indicators for measuring the different activities, then tailoring a selection of these indicators with project-specific data to define a set of the most relevant indicators for a given project. This methodology is illustrated by means of a case study in a manufacturing company.

Il existe aujourd'hui une competition feroce entre les entreprises pour concevoir et livrer des produits sur le marche des que possible; celles-ci cherchent ainsi a developper plus rapidement que jamais des systemes qui doivent parfaitement repondre a des besoins de clients toujours plus exigeants. Les chercheurs en ingenierie systeme, en gestion de projet et en definition de concept, entre autres disciplines, ont compris qu'identifier precisement et exhaustivement les parties prenantes des le debut d'un projet de conception d'un nouveau systeme est essentiel pour bien definir les besoins et livrer au final un systeme qui reponde au mieux aux diverses attentes. L'objectif de cet article est ainsi d'aider les equipes d'analyse et de conception a determiner les differentes parties prenantes d'un projet de developpement d'un systeme technique. Notre proposition consiste en une typologie des parties prenantes permettant de faciliter leur identification et une table pour ponderer leur contribution au projet en fonction de leur importance. La proposition, conforme a la norme ISO / IEC / IEEE 15288 (2015), a ete experimentee dans trois etudes de cas, aboutissant a une premiere validation de celle-ci et a des opportunites d'amelioration futures.

In recent years, data visualization has received a lot of attention and widely applicate in many areas. Data is a treasure, a lot of valuable information hidden inside. While visualizing the hidden information concisely and intuitively is a critical task. In this paper, we explore how data visualization could support conceptual design. A specific conceptual design case for improving the fuel efficiency of wheel loader is implemented. By visualizing the complex fuel consumption data comprehensive for engineers to get insights, thus to support the decision making for a new product development. As a result, a table of classifying visual techniques by different features, and a prototype consisted of four approaches step by step to present complex data are proposed.

The current complexity of systems requires a full understanding of stakeholder needs in system design. Later, these needs will become requirements of the system: functional requirements are quite easy to describe for the customer, but finding the non-functional requirements is an actual challenge; however, they are essential to design the system. The objective of this research work is to provide support when defining non-functional requirements. The proposal consists in a requirement classification and a questionnaire that progressively guides the elicitation of stakeholder needs. This method is applied to three case studies, demonstrating its interest and indicating opportunities for improvement.

With the growing economic pressure, one lever for companies to be competitive is to efficiently monitor projects. To this goal, the different processes involved in the project must be carefully supervised and the project manager needs to be well-informed on their state and progress to take the best decisions thanks to accurate performances of indicators, process, and project. Another key factor of successful decision-making in engineering projects beyond taking into account information from the project manager on the project management (PM) is to consider information from the systems engineer on the product development. This paper proposes a process to monitor engineering projects relying on a set of project performance indicators that integrate the views of both project manager and systems engineer. This process includes three main activities: 1) defining project performance indicators related to the processes described by international guides and standards; 2) valuating and weighting these indicators by consulting project managers and systems engineers; and 3) constructing a hierarchical framework of indexes to support project monitoring. This proposal thus refers to the practices described in PM and systems engineering norms and improves them by involving project managers and systems engineers into decision-making, with the goal to take more coherent decisions.

Agile methods are receiving a growing interest from industry and these approaches are nowadays well accepted and deployed in software engineering. However, some issues remain to introduce agility in systems engineering. The objective of this paper is to show an agile management implementation in an educational project consisting in developing a connected mobile robot, and to evaluate the issues and benefits of adopting an agile approach. Among the most famous agile management methods, SCRUM has been chosen to lead this experiment. This paper first presents the project and how students traditionally manage it, then it describes how Scrum could be used instead. It evaluates the difficulties and interests to introduce agility in this project, and concludes on the ability of Scrum to design, test and progressively integrate the system, thus providing an operational prototype more quickly.

Este articulo propone una Metodologia para transformar Necesidades en Requisitos, integrando Ingenieria de Sistemas, Calidad y Pensamiento Esbelto. La eleccion metodologica fue de metodos cualitativos al aplicar las estrategias de cuestionario y caso de estudio. El objetivo general fue desarrollar una metodologia, fundamentada en la Ingenieria de Sistemas, para documentar los requisitos de los individuos u organizaciones que tienen derecho, parte, reclamo o interes en el sistema (stakeholders), agregar valor a los procesos de analisis y diseno, y asegurar la calidad del sistema. La metodologia fue desarrollada inicialmente a traves del modelo de cascada y, posteriormente del modelo incremental evolutivo al integrar Calidad y Pensamiento Esbelto. La principal contribucion se centra en apoyar a los equipos de analisis y diseno de sistemas, al traducir las necesidades en requisitos por medio de una metodologia formal y estructurada que combina diferentes areas del conocimiento. Al aplicar la metodologia y sus herramientas, en un caso practico, se alcanzo el objetivo: agregar valor al proceso; la documentacion generada permitira el reuso de la informacion para el desarrollo de futuros sistemas. Se detectaron areas de oportunidad, como la necesidad de aplicar formatos complementarios, automatizar la herramienta y desarrollar mas casos de estudio

As economic pressure continues to mount worldwide, closer cooperation is needed between people, companies and even countries. At the same time, the scale of projects is constantly rising. In order to ensure the success of large-scale projects, the way different teams cooperate is becoming increasingly important. Cooperation between systems engineering and project management is now key in this respect. On the other hand, it is widely recognised that the use of standards can improve the success ratio. Thus, integration using standards or guides from systems engineering and project management can help companies improve their competitiveness. A host of standards or guides have already been published in both domains. The purpose of this paper is to take the most frequently used standards or guides from systems engineering and project management, to compare them and build a bridge between them so as to provide a view shared by systems engineers and project managers enabling them to carry out their projects effectively.