This book is an outcome of a joint European project, SYDIC-Telecom
(SYstem Design Industry Council of European Telecom Industries). The
motivation of the participating companies to join their efforts was the agreed
observation that system design know-how, being one of their main assets,
cannot be reused and capitalized effectively enough today.
Challenges and problems are caused by the following development in the
industry:
System design, system architecting, intellectual property, reuse.
Abstract:
Key words:
1. MOTIVATION
Fast evolution of product properties, e. g. more functionality and
diversity, requiring managing of product families, more effort needed
to design the new, complex functionality, more designers involved in
design projects, etc.
Fast evolution of technologies, requiring frequent adaptations of the
methodology.
New application domains appearing, requiring novel use of designer
expertise.
Decreasing time-to-market (TTM) despite increased functionality,
diversity and complexity.
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4.
Chapter 1
The authors of this book are well aware that there is quite a lot of
material in this book and that different types of readers are likely to be
interested in specific sections of the book. Consequently we recognize need
to give some practical advise where to put the focus based on the
background of the reader. In the following we identify typical classes of
readers and suggest them a reading flow.
The first type is a reader who wants to get an overall picture of the topics
of the book and who is not necessarily very familiar with the domain. Such a
reader is advised to follow the course of presentation. When reading Chapter
4, it is useful to frequently refer to Annex A5.
The second type is an industrial product development practitioner, such
as a system engineer or a system architect. In this case Chapters 2 and 3 do
not probably bring much new information and can be skipped or browsed
lightly. Reading Chapter 4 is necessary for understanding the rest of the
book, so it should not be skipped although it appears rather theoretical.
Annex A5 helps digesting Chapter 4. Chapter 5 may or may not be of
interest, depending on how much the reader is using design languages.
However, we believe that Chapters 6, 7 and 8 are the most interesting ones
for an industrial system developer.
The third type is a person responsible of methodology development
and/or product development process improvement in a company. Similarly
as above, Chapters 2 and 3 can be browsed lightly. Chapter 4 is the most
important for a methodology developer. We believe that the System Design
Process Model (SDPM) can be directly applied as a metamodel for process
definition purposes. Likewise, the model of System Under Design (SUDM)
can be used as a metamodel for methodology development, e.g. for the
definition of UML profiles. Chapter 5 and especially Annex A3 give a useful
2 Chapter 1
5. Demand for decreasing cost in the market encountering price erosion.
Adding the fact that it today is very difficult to reuse existing knowledge,
the industry is faced with an increasing and serious problem: lack of
experienced system designers.
The results of the project presented in this book are meant to provide the
foundation to improve the product development capabilities of companies to
cope with the above challenges. For this we need a system level design
methodology with reuse of know-how. This can also open new business
opportunities for providers of such know-how, i.e. a market for system
design Intellectual Property (in the following called 'IP').