Renovating engineering departements’ creation heritage to meet contemporary challenges: frugal validation patterns and constructive proof logics for new engineering rules

Engineering departments design infrastructure by applying rule systems. The latter are an old creation heritage, based on decades of engineering, that makes it possible to design and govern the operation of the physical heritage which is the infrastructure. Replacing the infrastructure is not sustainable in the meaning of grand challenges; renovating it by applying engineering rules is but could appear too expensive. The literature highlights situations where renovation by respecting the state of the art is too costly and so is the validation of new renovation rules. Are there forms of frugal validation that allow for sustainable renovation of existing systems? This paper tries to explore a third way, a renovation of the physical heritage from a renovation of the system of rules, conceiving in the system of rules, new propositions, and their validation. Using the C-K theory, a case analysis was performed within the French national rail network manager (SNCF Network), a company that has a historical engineering heritage and is at the same time implementing a renovation of it. The paper shows that the renovation of engineering departments’ creation heritage can go through frugal validation patterns and constructive proof logics.