Towards Agile Systems Engineering in Early Stage Design for Complex Naval Vessels

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of methodological support to tackle the challenges of uncertain and complex requirements, amorphous procedures and increasing systems complexity in early stage naval vessels design. The findings show that methodological support is available through various separate methods such as the Ship Design Spiral, the Systems Engineering Vee model, Agile Development Methods and Agile Systems Architectures, but lack integration into a holistic method. To overcome this problem, a Multi Domain Matrix is introduced that integrates the several approaches by combining Process Architecture Design Structure Matrices and Product Architecture Design Structure Matrices. Furthermore an approach is proposed that combines activities of the Ship Design Spiral, the Systems Engineering Vee model and agile method Scrum with an Agile Systems Architecture Pattern applied to naval ship architecture. Thus, this paper contributes to a holistic methodology in naval ship design to address current and future challenges through Agile Systems Engineering.