Whitepaper: Systems Engineering for Smart Products

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Today’s products are increasingly more intelligent and interconnected – thus the widely adopted ‘smart’ prefix – smart cars, smart buildings, smart appliances. Software-controlled mechatronic systems are used routinely to deliver advanced features, improve safety and reduce power consumption. Consequently, product development processes intended for hardware-dominated systems are no longer adequate. Special attention must be given to the electronics and embedded software that control these systems – in addition to all the interacting hardware components. Managing product complexity, reducing software development cost and optimising system performance at all design phases are mounting challenges that many companies are addressing. This paper examines three best practices being implemented to overcome these challenges: model-based systems engineering, virtual system prototyping and model-based software development.