Vision and Outlook for Systems Architecting and Systems Engineering in the High-Tech Equipment Industry

The purpose of this document is to guide ESI research in Systems Architecting (SA) and Systems Engineering (SE), including collaborative studies. ESI aims to address the upcoming needs of the high-tech equipment industry. For this purpose, industry needs and consequential research outlooks have been elaborated in this document as a vehicle to support coordination and alignment of ESI research with the high-tech equipment industry. Systems engineering complexity in the high-tech equipment industry has increased, as the systems themselves steadily evolved with increased functionality and complexity [1]. Current systems integrate a large number of diverse technologies, undergo rapid technological advancement, are increasingly SW-intense, and connected to other systems. Also, the level of regulatory compliance has increased, and lifecycle management plays an increasingly large role for these long-lifetime systems. The overarching need of the high-tech equipment Industry is to continue to develop and offer competitive products onto the world market in terms of cost, time-to-market, quality, and product features, and to retain their respective market-leading positions. The ever-increasing complexity and new technologies such as AI present R&D and lifecycle challenges to the industry, giving rise to needs to improve their Systems Architecting (SA) and System Engineering capabilities. This vision document presents an overview of identified relevant trends and challenges across the high-tech equipment industry, and describes the derived industry needs to upgrade their Systems Architecting and Systems Engineering capabilities. This document then elaborates these industry needs across a number of themes and provides an envisioned outcome for the SA/SE way-of-working in 2035. This envisioned outcome then is the basis of the research outlook what new methodologies or approaches are needed to meet that outcome. These research topics and outlook form the basis for alignment of ESI’s research program and collaborative studies, in coordination with the high-tech equipment industry ecosystem.