Panels
Tuesday 1 May
Education and academic panel
On one hand, systems engineering is being looked at and mandated as the way to tackle the complex problems associated with acquiring and maintaining our 21st century socio-technical systems. On the other hand, poor systems engineering is being blamed for failures in acquiring those same systems especially in the United States Department of Defense.
Some of the issues can be explained by the insight that systems engineering is an emerging discipline and displays the characteristics of such an emerging discipline, namely defects, myths, and debates in which the participants speak but do not listen.
This panel examines the question of what academia is doing to:
- help systems engineering emerge as a discipline, and
- ensure that the students currently enrolled in systems engineering courses will be able to avoid those failures in future projects?
The format of the panel will be similar to the format of the Academic Forum at the
INCOSE International Symposium in Singapore in 2009. Panellists will not be making
presentations, they will respond to questions from the chair and the audience.
Test & Evaluation Panel
What is Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) and Military Off The Shelf (MOTS) doing to our T&E capability?
Heading down the path and acquiring COTS and MOTS combat systems can have cost, schedule and risk benefits but there are many other factors and compromises that come into play. In this panel session views from both the Australian and United Stated Department of Defence senior T&E representatives will be presented on the subject followed by an opportunity for the audience to ask questions of the panel members.
Panel Members
Air Commodore Noel Derwort
Commander, Aerospace Operational Support Group, Royal Australian Air Force
David W. Duma
Principal Deputy Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, US Department of Defence
Captain Mark Kellam
Director, Royal Australian Navy Test Evaluation & Analysis Authority , Royal Australian Navy
Grant Medbury
Director General, Land Engineering Agency, Australian Defence Material Organisation
Panel Format
The panel session will run for 60 minutes with 10 minutes for each panel member to
discuss their views on the subject for their area of responsibility. The remaining 20
minutes will be open to questions.
Wednesday 2 May
Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) panel and open forum
There is a growing swell of interest in model-based systems engineering (MBSE) in Australia, as evident from previous SETE conferences, the recent DSTO MBSE Symposium and the formation of the Model-based concept engineering working group. The aim of this plenary session is to address some of the challenges facing the MBSE community in the adoption of MBSE and to identify opportunities to be taken forward in meeting these challenges.
This moderated panel will answer a number of questions posed by the chair, with opportunities for comments and follow-up questions from the audience.
Transportation Panel
Capital program delivery in the transport domain
Systems engineering and systems thinking is increasingly being looked at as the way to tackle complex problems in the transport domain, whether it is for delivering technology-based systems or major public infrastructure. However, leadership of these endeavours is traditionally drawn from non-systems-thinking disciplines of engineering and the commercial world. The effort to steer the engineering process along systems engineering principles is also usually stymied in the face of short-term political and commercial agendas.
One of the challenges posed to systems engineering in this domain is to effectively engage with and guide key decision makers early enough to facilitate creation of a commercial framework within which effective systems engineering can be embedded into the delivery process.
This panel provides a forum to share lessons learnt from applying systems engineering and systems thinking approaches in addressing these challenges. The format of the panel will be based on 10 minute presentations by panellists, followed by 30 mins of discussions, prompted by questions from the chair and audience.
Chair:
Lilanthi Balasingham, Parsons Brinckerhoff
Invited speakers
Sarah Capstick, Translink Transit Authority, QLD, Australia
Anne O’Neil, New York City Transit Authority, NYC, USA
Tom Haskins, Haskins Consulting, VIC, Australia
Kerry Lunney, Thales Australia, Australia