Systems Engineering: planes (and much more) perform better and longer thanks to Capella

You probably know that familiar image between the fluttering of a butterfly's wings and the unleashing of a storm.

Let’s use that metaphor with a new Airbus plane case. You may have planned everything in the requirements and specifications initial guidebook, it’s impossible to anticipate all the future technical evolutions. Especially since their origin may be an insignificant event.

If tomorrow, you decide to add an USB plug to every passenger seat, it would have a major impact on the entire plane from the network cabling, to the total weight, and its electric consumption… Difficult to foresee that 50 years before, at the beginning of the plane conception!

That’s a typical Systems Engineering problem we wanted to solve with Thales Group, with which we collaborate since 2007.

Let me tell you more about Capella. Capella was developed by Thales to help engineers formalize the specification of systems and master their architectural design. It provides methodological guidance, intuitive model editing, and viewing capabilities for Systems, Software and Harware Architects working on Embedded Systems. Based on Eclipse Sirius and available in Open Source, Capella is a sustainable and adaptable workbench successfully deployed in a wide variety of industrial contexts (aerospace, energy, communication, transportation, …).

Thanks to Capella, engineers could collaborate on an industrial project, using the same language, and without applying to cumbersome and nonfunctional guidebook.

It was the main topic of my talk at a workshop focusing on embedded system conception, last November 19th, at Munich in Germany. I would like to thank Fortiss, one of the German Institute on the cutting edge of modelisation technology, which invited me to speak.

Like when we talked about Capella at INCOSE at Seattle, or during our Montreal and Munich road-shows, we shared lively and enriching discussions. I hope that we will continue this discussion at SiriusCon, next December 3rd, at Paris.

Etienne Juliot @Ejuliot Vice-President @Obeo_Corp