Towards a Federation Method to Enable Organizations to Interoperate on Complex Systems Engineering Projects

ABSTRACT This paper explores the benefits of developing a method to support and enable effective collaboration between organizations involved in complex and large‐scale engineering projects, particularly focused on interoperability challenges that represent a classical stake to overcome in such collaborative contexts. The paper highlights particularly issues concerning the requested use of heterogeneous engineering languages, and respect of operational practices of project stakeholders and organizational habits. The goal is to outline the foundations of a method that facilitates seamless data, information, and knowledge exchange while preserving each organization's engineering culture. To do this, the emphasis is placed on the importance of specifying, and comparing organizational habits, practices, and languages, and then finding compromises.