Some Lessons Learned from Teaching SE and MBSE

This paper shares experience in teaching Systems Engineering (SE) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) at ISAE-SUPAERO, college of aerospace engineering at the University of Toulouse, France. Fundamental to the development of complex systems, SE has its place in different educational programs, at different levels, and with different approaches. Starting from the mission statement of a development, passing via requirements engineering, operational analysis, functional analysis, logical and physical architecture design, verification and validation, the production phase, the use phase, and finally the retirement phase, SE is explained to the students. At each step, the authors of the paper give insight in the results of the teaching of these topics, the challenges and the lessons learned. Having transitioned from document-centric approaches to model-based approaches, teaching MBSE has become important. After all, students that graduate from top universities are expected to know how MBSE works, how to use some tools so that they can easily adopt other tools in the work life, and to use the tools to the fullest advantage including formal verification of designs. The authors of the paper share their experience in teaching MBSE in the aerospace engineering programs at Master's level. MBSE is viewed in terms of languages, tools and methods. The paper focuses discussion on SysML, its support by a free tool that offers simulation and formal verification capabilities, and a method that applies to a broad variety of systems. Teaching MBSE cannot be dissociated from teaching SE. Experience in teaching MBSE is discussed in the paper and links with classes on formal methods are also identified as far as formal verification of SysML models is concerned.