Systems Engineering and Validation: A systematic literature review

The European Green Deal is one of the key milestones in achieving the European Commission's sustainability goals. A key objective is to reduce the use of resources in order to reduce global emissions. Early validation of products is one way to reduce the need for late rework or modification of equipment, which in turn reduces the use of resources. It also has the benefit of reducing costs and the time-to-market, as late product changes require more resources and time. This is especially challenging for complex systems, where interconnects are often difficult to identify. For this reason, many companies use Systems Engineering as a design method to collaborate on products across departments and disciplines. Early validation and Systems Engineering are usually used separately, but research shows that the combination can provide an advantage in development, so a basis for linking them and further research needs to be identified. In this paper, a systematic literature review was conducted to identify approaches for early validation and Systems Engineering. It also examined the suitability of using these approaches in combination for product development and design of intelligent systems. This resulted in 49 potential methods being identified and evaluated according to requirements of the industry. They are discussed based on a concrete example in special purpose machinery in the production context of complex intelligent systems.