Abstract

Increasingly, multidisciplinary simulations are being built with contributions from multiple groups, or even from multiple companies. In my career, I’ve worked on several MBD projects that were distributed across multiple groups. Each of these projects proceeded in very different ways, but they all had some commonality in the types of problems encountered during the lifecycle of the project. Managing projects that are distributed this way presents unique challenges that are not encountered on projects developed within one organization, including: - Developing a consistent, unambiguous system-level design. This is more critical and more difficult in a Distributed MBD project. The participants are not co-located so collaboration is more difficult. - Communicating the design to the participating groups. Ensuring each group has a clear and precise understanding takes on added importance in a distributed project. Textual requirements are often imprecise and misinterpreted. - Ensuring the groups accurately implement the design. Because the groups are not working side-by-side, each group must deliver a component that precisely implements the design, both in intent and in details. A group that does not properly implement the component will cause problems downstream for the group that is integrating it. - Integrating the components from the different groups. When integrating components, the developers might not be present, so iterating on the details during integration is unacceptable. Because the groups are physically separated, refining the details at this stage can result in time-consuming phone calls and may even necessitate travel while the team wait for the integrated simulation. - Managing the project as it evolves and grows. All of the above topics are revisited each time the team updates the simulation. This presentation will discuss: - Some of the lessons I have learned from my experience with Distributed MBD Projects - Why the traditional techniques, ICDs and perhaps some packaging technology, do not adequately address the challenges faced by a project lead who is managing a Distributed MBD project. - A new approach to managing Distribute MBD projects, as embodied in the SystemBlend- tool suite.