Strategic Planning in the Digital Engineering of Smart Product-Based System of Systems Reconfiguration

Abstract

Future product and service innovations are increasingly based on cross-system and cross-industry functionalities and components. As a result of the increasing connectivity and intelligence of products towards smart products, the system boundaries are also becoming increasingly fuzzy with the result that new smart product-based system of systems are emerging. In order to make these resilient and innovative in operation in the future, approaches for reconfiguring functionalities are playing an increasingly important role. For this purpose, the article presents a lifecycle-supporting method that enables the integration of dynamic external factors in the sense of strategic system of systems requirements into an existing system of systems with smart products as core components for the target-oriented reconfiguration. The focus here is on the identification and integration of dynamic external factors in terms of requirements from strategic management across the different granularity levels relevant to the system of systems. For this purpose, a multi-stage framework-model is presented which describes the strategic requirements integration at the system of systems level via a corresponding development of system of systems capabilities and their systematic break-down to functions (in sense of intended system behavior) and system logic up to the solution level in the sense of the smart product-instance. The framework supports the model-based reconfiguration based on the identified reconfiguration-need and derived reconfiguration potential from strategic management phases upstream the traditional product lifecycle management phases with the use of an associated integral System of Systems Engineering Lifecycle Management.