System engineering under the spotlight

On 25 October Spain’s first National System-Engineering Congress was held under the banner “An inter-sector view of system engineering in Spain”. With joint participation by industry, academia and the public at large, its remit was to swap notes on system engineering and encourage ongoing innovation.

System engineering, as a particular branch of engineering as a whole, involves an interdisciplinary approach and represents the best way of developing and rolling out successful systems with due consideration given to the development stages and integrating all stakeholders without thereby forfeiting an overview of the problem in hand. System engineering has a whole host of applications: medicine, transport, aeronautics, telecommunications and robotics, etc.

Among other firms GMV was present as an industry representative, talking about the success story in the defense area: “View of system engineering as applied to the foot soldier”. The paper revolved around the problem posed by foot-soldier modernization programs, to do with ergonomics, feature creep, overweight equipment and low autonomy. This set of problems calls for application of system engineering principles in order to meet expectations without compromising the soldier’s performance.

The European Defense Agency (EDA) and the European Commission has launched several initiatives for development of a reference foot-soldier-system architecture based on said system-engineering principles. GMV is playing a crucial role in the development of this architecture, leading such consortiums as the one set up for EDA’s STASS II project or contributing to the European Commission’s GOSSRA project.

The event was organized by the System-Engineering Observatory of the Horizons Network (Red Horizontes) of the public corporation ISDEFE, in collaboration with the Spanish System Engineering Association (Asociación Española de Ingeniería de Sistemas: AEIS).