SE-WAVE: Systems Engineering Wide Area Virtual Environment

As Navy systems grow in size and complexity, engineering teams struggleto stay connected to a degree that enables them to share engineeringdata. It is just not reasonable to force everyone to use the same toolset, yet a common model of the data is essential to uncover problems andinconsistencies early in the development life cycle. The lack of largescale systems engineering ultimately results in battle groupinteroperability problems.Modus Operandi proposes a Systems Engineering Wide Area VirtualEnvironment (SE-WAVE) to connect engineering teams and provide a systemsengineering point of view over a diverse set of engineeringapplications. The virtual object-oriented repository connects theapplications to provide a common model of the data without requiringengineers to switch to a new tool set, and without disrupting day-to-dayoperations. This approach also makes it easy to adopt incrementally andto evolve to support new applications. With this seamless integratedview, systems engineering analyses such as traceability and consistencychecking become possible on a larger scale. SE-WAVE's human-centricdesign features make it easy for the users to get full value from thisnetwork of integrated information. SE-WAVE benefits the Navy by identifying system problems earlier in thelife cycle. Requirements-related problems are increasingly more costlyto repair the later in the life cycle they are identified. SE-WAVEenables requirements tracing and consistency checking in situationswhere the engineering data is not contained within a single integratedtool suite.The SE-WAVE approach is well suited to geographically distributed teamsthat need to share information from diverse data sources. It can bedeployed more quickly, and with lower risk, than solutions that requireteams to adopt a whole new set of applications, or that force data intoa single repository.In addition to collaborative systems engineering, expected commercialapplications of SE-WAVE in the Integrated Workgroup Solutions marketinclude contract performance management with metrics from integratedenterprise data sources, and application of the discipline ofrequirements management to needs such as workforce training andcertification. In the federal marketplace, SE-WAVE technologies can beused to enable sharing of information from diverse multi-agency legacydata sources for homeland security.