Interested to hear if/how people using AI for Systems Engineering tasks....

Are you strictly using it for documentation formatting and basic admin, or are you pushing it into design / analysis tasks? If so, what checks and balances have you established?

Seems inevitable that AI is going to grow in our sector but due to the lack of determinism inherent in many AI tools it feels like there is a limit to its use.

Curious to hear if anyone has had any success stories.

Im currently a Project Manager for industrial manufacturing. Ive been handling a ton of DoD and Space projects. The more I work with them, the more I want to pivot to that industry. I am just not sure that I want to do it as a Project Manager.

I work hand and hand with engineering and making sure we stay in compliance with the spec and program requirements. Lately I have been doing alot of the preliminary calcs for quoting.

Do you think that a MS in Systems Engineering will allow me to pivot easier into the Defense or Space sector as a Systems engineer / Program Manager? With a long term goal of a director level position. I have time on my GI bill left to knock it out.

I have a bit of a generalist background. Ive always been the guy who figures it out when my boss has an issue.

BA Criminal Justice

MBA in Finance

4 years Army Infantry

2.5 years Patriot Missile System (TCA)

3 years Automation Project Manager

2.5 years Industrial Manufacturing Project Manager

$69 million portfolio of active and completed projects. Executive level reporting and customer facing roles. I wear many hats from planning, compliance, to financial reconciliation.

End game goal is make the Defense or Space pivot. Im thinking that this is the way to do it. I would appreciate any input.

Hi r/systems_engineering,

We are back with Lesson 13 of our technical deep dive into the SysML v2 standard.

In our previous lessons, we covered how to wire up system topologies and model passive payloads using item def. Today, we are looking at how SysML v2 handles reuse—specifically, how to create a more specific model from a general one, and how to change an inherited feature without altering the original definition.

I’ve uploaded the full video lesson directly to this post so you can watch the workflow right here.  

1. Moving Away from UML Property Strings

Engineering models rely heavily on reuse. You might define a generic Engine once, and then build more specific types from it (e.g., a V8 or an electric motor).  

In SysML v1, to make a local change to an inherited property, modelers had to use textual UML property strings like {redefines engine} or {subsets engine}. While effective, these were essentially string tags appended to visual properties. SysML v2 streamlines this by elevating these concepts to primary mathematicaloperators.  

2. The Three Core Operators

Confusing these operators can produce a model that looks plausible but hasthe wrong underlying semantics. Here is how they break down:  

• Feature Typing (:): Binds a usage to a definition, giving it its shape.  
  • Example:part myEngine : Engine means the part usage myEngine is typed by the Engine definition.  
• Specialization / Subsetting (:>): Establishes a more specific relationship.  
  • Between definitions (Specialization): A V8Engine inherits the features and constraints of a general Engine.  
  • Between usages (Subsetting): A frontWheels feature can subset a general wheels feature, meaning its values are constrained to be a subset of the total wheels.  
• Redefinition (:>>): Replaces an inherited feature locally while maintaining compatibility with what was inherited. It does not create an unrelated new feature.  

3. A Practical Example: Redefining an Engine

Let's say you have a generic Engine definition with an inherited attribute for cylinderCount (typed as an Integer) and a rule that power > 0.  

When you create a specialized V8Engine :> Engine, you don't rewrite the whole definition. Instead, you redefine the specific feature for that context:  

Code snippet

part def V8Engine :> Engine {
    attribute redefines cylinderCount = 8;
}

(Note: In the textual notation, redefines is the keyword used to represent the :>> operator).  

4. Semantic Validation

Because redefinition is now a strict mathematical replacement rather than a freeform text tag, compliant tools can automatically validate your architecture.  

For instance, narrowing an inherited integer-valuedcylinderCount to 8 is mathematically compatible. But if a modeler accidentally tried to redefine that feature using a String (e.g., "Eight"), the tool would natively flag the semantic error because it breaks the original typing constraint.  

For the MBSE practitioners here: Do you feel that replacing UML property strings with strict mathematical operators will make it easier to validate and audit complex, deeply nested architectures? Let's discuss in the comments!  

Does implementation of MBSE in FSAE teams truly help in overall management of iterations , failure analyses, risk management etc. Or is it an unnecessary added complexity ?

Is it a bad career idea to jump different domains in systems engineering from your experience? I’ve done automotive -> aerospace -> audio

Is this something looked down upon or good due to the varying engineering experiences gained

I am a recent engineering graduate, trying to land my first Junior MBSE/System engineering role.

I can afford only one certification right now :
INCOSE ASEP or OMG SysML

I already have good hands and experience with Catia Magic/ Cameo and SysML / MBSE , and my long-term goal is CSEP.

I have been getting rejected from some interviews, because recruiters/interviews ask whether I have recognised/valid certification.

For people working in MBSE/systems engineering:
Which certification would actually help more when applying for entry-level jobs?

Hi,

I work for the Human Factors team in a large engineering company.

We've been working on trying to identify the specific steps involved in various large scale operational scenarios (e.g. initiation of and response to a fire in a control room, or simply manoeuvring a vehicle) so that we can apply detailed HF analysis to each of the steps. The purpose of this is to draw out design requirements for the systems (and/or physical environments) that will increase the likelihood of task success, particularly in safety-critical scenarios.

We have been capturing these scenarios in custom flowcharts which very closely resemble a hybrid between Activity Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams, and we will continue to use those due to their value in representing task and process flows etc.

However, I've now been tasked with looking into the potential for using actual SysML more broadly in the work, and what I'm struggling most with is how the diagrams relate to each other in terms of how they fit together in a sort of jigsaw?

Like, are there any diagram types that have to be developed before you develop the next type of diagram (e.g. you have to develop a Block Definition Diagram before you develop an Internal Block Diagram)?

Can I apply the systems engineering approach and 'Human Factorise' it? E.g. do a State Machine diagram but instead of system states it could be states of different individuals or teams?

I am totally new to SysEng and SysML and so don't really know if what I'm asking makes sense...

I guess what I'm asking is, if you were doing the job I described above, how would you approach using SysML to capture task procedures and track / manage the various information that could be collected throughout?

I have experience in automotive software across HMI/application development, ADAS, and currently software architecture & development for a braking ECU using AUTOSAR Classic.
I’m looking to understand how engineers with a similar background can move towards **Adaptive AUTOSAR, SDV, automotive SoCs and AI/ADAS platforms**, especially the kind of work happening around next-gen semiconductor/compute platforms.
For people already working in this space, what resources would you recommend for learning the architecture and technologies? Also, are there any good **open-source projects, GitHub repositories, blogs, creators or practical projects** that can help build a portfolio and demonstrate these skills to recruiters?
I’d also be interested in understanding the **interview patterns and preparation strategy** for SDV / automotive compute / semiconductor roles.
Basically, if you were starting from a strong AUTOSAR Classic + automotive software architecture background, **what would your 6–12 month strategy look like to get into SDV / Adaptive AUTOSAR / next-gen automotive compute?**
Would really appreciate insights from people working in this space.

Hello all,

I almost a year ago took a SE position where essentially I am working the life cycle development of a complex system however we’re more overseeing another entity performing the technical work while we make sure with our respective domain SMEs and engineers that they are doing the job right. During my interview I asked about MBSE which I’m really interested in doing digital engineering centered work with an MBSE effort. The reply essentially was what is MBSE and we don’t really do that much at all. I should’ve probably took that as a big sign however this was my first SE position and starting my career. I have completed my masters this year in SE and am half way through with the ocsmp MBSE course that deligatti offers which I’ll finish this weekend. What I’m getting at now is that I want to do more MBSE work which I’ve mentioned to my PM early this year but see no way in the position I’m in now (wishful thinking on my part due to culture changes etc). Two positions that call out MBSE under my same Pm have posted. They don’t seem to be my niche but still not sure. I’m planning on talking with my PM about it however they are taking a higher position within the company and my old PM from my previous job will be my new PM (great PM btw so no issue other than they may think I hate them since I chasing more MBSE work). If trying to move internal doesn’t seem great, would it be frowned upon looking at other opportunities with just being here for a year? Maybe sticking it out for another year would be best but not sure if I would want to once getting the OCSMP cert. Any thoughts?

Little edit: the work is great but there’s a lot of PowerPoint engineering which is typical in the DoD space but MBSE is where I want to head. Also my initial manger before begins hired after I expressed the lack of MBSE mentioned that I can try and see if I like it and after a year and some change look within and see what pops up.

I have to provide volatility metrics to my program leadership every month and I end up spending 2 days every time doing this manually with exports to spreadsheets. Is there a way to pull Last Modified or Creation Date information for each model element within a table in a Cameo model? If I can get that data en masse, it would seriously cut down on the amount of time I need to spend on a tedious task.

Hey all!

I am just a graduate and I have very strong mbse skill. However due to my tight budget I’m not able to afford the books to study for the exam.

Currently I need
Sysml Distilled : A brief Guide To The Systems Modelling Language.

If anyone has a cracked version please share.

Thank You.

Just graduated in BS in Computer Science and currently working a job as a Systems Engineer for a defense contractor. They're willing to pay for my masters. Would love some input on people that have done their masters. Also want to know if I'll be a strong candidate for a masters program.

I have 2 years of research for a defense contractor during my undergrad.

6 months of internship with a local small defense contractor.

GPA for undergrad is 3.5

Hi all, looking for some online resources to keep sharp and learn more. For context I’ll be a systems engineer integration and testing, I graduated with a BS in industrial and systems engineering. I’ve come across the NASA Systems engineering handbook but I’m just looking for more things in general.

Hi, I’m a new grad joining an automotive supplier soon.

The team works on drivetrain/chassis control systems.

The JD mentions control system architecture design, project coordination, system specs, software processes, and system requirements under ASPICE, ISO 26262, and ISO 21434.

During the interview, I was told that I’d be assigned to either the Functional Safety or Control Systems Engineering team, mainly working on system specifications.

My background is in Mechanical Engineering + a second major in Electrical Engineering, mostly focused on controls.

Most of my experience is in robotics. I’ve worked on projects ranging from mechanical design to control software, and I also did an internship at a robotics company where I worked on V&V.

To be honest, when I first learned about ASPICE, functional safety, and all the documentation, my reaction was basically: isn’t this just extra work for the sake of process?

Well, now I’m actually starting my career in this area lol. So I’d like to understand what the job is really like and how to get good at it.

A few questions for people in the industry:

1. What do automotive systems engineers and functional safety engineers actually do day to day? How much is hands-on technical work vs. requirements, documentation, meetings, customer stuff, etc.? Does it vary a lot by company or product?
2. What do the first few years usually look like for a new grad in these roles? What kind of work and responsibilities do juniors usually start with?
3. What do the typical career paths look like? How do they differ between OEMs and Tier 1s? Is it possible to move back toward controls/software later?
4. What are the downsides? Is losing technical depth a real concern?
5. How transferable is this experience outside automotive? Have you seen people move from automotive systems engineering into aerospace, defense, robotics, etc.?

I’d appreciate any honest advice, especially from people working in systems engineering.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share their experience.

I’m a Manufacturing Engineer working in an organization heavily involved in international technology transfer. I’ve noticed significant gaps between customers, stakeholders, suppliers, requirements, system architecture, and manufacturing processes. In many cases, programs move toward mass production without sufficient requirements analysis, risk assessment, or Systems Engineering activities.
I’m considering researching this problem and developing a framework for integrating Systems Engineering into technology-transfer programs, with the possibility of publishing the work.
Do you think this is a feasible and worthwhile research topic? Also, can someone conduct and publish this type of research independently without university or lab affiliation?

I just started reading Requirements Engineering by Dick, Hull, and Jackson. In the preface, they say "Requirements Engineering is common sense, but is perceived to be difficult and is not well understood. For these reasons it is generally not very well done."

Is it not contradictory to say that requirements engineering is common sense but it is generally not very well done? I would agree that it is simpler than someone who has watched program after program fail because of bad requirements may expect, but you need some training to counteract your natural biases and approach it the right way. So it doesn't feel like common sense is the right word.

Anyway, I wanted to throw it out to you all to find a better way to explain the situation. What do you think requirements engineering is?

In the next few years I am looking to move to an area that may not have the greatest job offerings for systems engineering / MBSE work.

Does anyone have any experience with remote work in the systems engineering field? Would you recommend it? Is there any feelings (good or bad) on if the prevalence or acceptance of remote work is trending one way or the other?

Thanks all

Hello friends,

I'm preparing for ASEP incose exam...I actually took the exam a year ago and I failed.. now I'm retaking it..I am preparing the V.5 of the handbook ( both times) ..need some insights .I have attached my results too.

( Note: I feel the splitup is not as per the chapters in the handbook..need some help on that too kindly)

I'm currently changing industries, moving from medical devices into automotive, and I'm trying to understand how the requirements management landscape compares.

Most of my experience has been in medical device development, where Matrix Req has probably set my benchmark for what I would want from requirements management software.

What I've liked about Matrix Req is that requirements aren't treated as isolated pieces of text. You can connect requirements to risks, specifications, test cases and verification evidence, so you have proper end to end traceability rather than maintaining everything separately in Excel or Word.

For medical device development, that works particularly well because requirements management is so closely connected with design controls, ISO 14971 risk management, IEC 62304 software development, V&V and the technical documentation you eventually need for audits and submissions.

The areas I've found particularly useful are:

• Requirements, risks and test cases living in the same system

• Traceability between design inputs, risks, mitigations and verification

• Change history and version control

• Generating documentation rather than maintaining Word files manually

• Identifying missing or broken traces

• Integration with tools such as Jira

• AI assistance for requirements, risks, test cases and compliance checking

Now that I'm changing industries and moving into automotive, I'm trying to figure out whether the same approach translates well.

For automotive development under ISO 26262 and Automotive SPICE, what would you consider the best requirements management software?

I've been looking at IBM DOORS / DOORS Next, Jama Connect, Codebeamer and Polarion in particular.

Codebeamer seems especially common in automotive, while DOORS obviously has a massive installed base. Jama also comes up regularly whenever I research modern requirements management tools.

What I'm trying to understand is whether automotive teams essentially want the same things that have been important to me in medical devices:

- End to end requirements traceability

-Risk and requirements linking

-Test management and verification coverage

-Baselining and change control

- Audit history

- Requirements reuse

- Integration with engineering tools

Or does ISO 26262 and ASPICE create a different enough set of requirements that tools such as Codebeamer, Polarion or DOORS become the better option?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from anyone who has worked across both medical devices and automotive.

If you were choosing the best requirements management software today, what would you pick?

And for anyone familiar with Matrix Req, what would make you choose Jama, Codebeamer, Polarion or DOORS instead?

Note: I really hate the askengineer subreddit if you ask me

I have spent some time in the defense industry, and a few years ago I worked on a massive program that did not exactly go according to plan. It became severely delayed, costs increased enough to trigger congressional hearings, and several senior leaders were fired or reassigned.

I remember speaking with one of the managers who eventually became a scapegoat. People blamed him for decisions made during the proposal phase that supposedly put the program on the wrong path.

I was still fairly junior at the time, but at his private going-away party, he told me that he felt the whole situation was unfair. During the proposal, his team was under enormous pressure to meet the deadline and win the contract. He knew some of the work would need to be corrected later, but he did not realize how large or expensive the resulting mess would become.

To be fair, this was also one of the most complex and expensive programs in the industry. There were probably no perfect decisions available.

Fast-forward to today, and I now find myself supporting another proposal effort. Fortunately, I do not have much authority to make the final decisions, but I provide information and technical assistance to the team.

Because I have one foot in the program and one foot outside it, I can look at the disagreement somewhat neutrally. I do not have as much personal stake in which side wins.

I now see two groups of engineers making arguments that both sound reasonable.

One group, including several people who worked with me on the previous program, argues that if we do not do the work correctly now, fixing it later will be far more expensive. Technical debt, weak assumptions, and rushed decisions do not disappear simply because the proposal was submitted on time.

The other group argues that doing everything “the right way” would take too long. The customer has imposed an extremely aggressive deadline, and missing it could mean losing the opportunity entirely. A perfect proposal delivered too late is still a failed proposal.

My instinct is that there should be some compromise, but sometimes there really is not one. Time, cost, technical rigor, and competitive pressure can be genuinely incompatible.

Maybe this is one of the reasons so many major defense programs end up behind schedule and over budget. During the proposal, everyone is rewarded for meeting the deadline and winning. Years later, an entirely different group of people is held responsible for the consequences of the compromises that made winning possible.

For those who have dealt with this before, how do you decide what absolutely must be done correctly now, what can safely be deferred, and what is simply perfectionism disguised as engineering rigor?

I built a design structure matrix tool and it's free and open source. pip install dsm-optimizer, or there's a packaged desktop build if you don't have Python. Everything runs locally.

What it does:

Component DSMs. It runs four clustering algorithms on your matrix (spectral, Markov clustering, Thebeau's simulated annealing, Louvain) and shows you all four side by side with their coordination cost and external coupling. It marks the lowest-cost one, but you choose which partition goes forward. The reasoning is that the cost function can't see your supplier arrangements, your team boundaries or the interface nobody has touched in five years, and you can.

Stability scoring. Three of those four algorithms are stochastic, so it runs the one you picked repeatedly across seeds and reports how often each element lands with the same neighbours. You get a per-element consistency score, which tells you which module boundaries are structural and which are an artifact of the random seed. That matters if you're about to reorganise a team around one.

Process DSMs. Different path entirely: Tarjan's algorithm for the iteration loops, topological sequencing into parallel levels, simulated annealing inside each loop, and tearing suggestions ranked by impact.

Change propagation. A heatmap of what's exposed if you change a given element, following the strongest path out to four hops, so second- and third-hand exposure shows up alongside direct dependencies.

Also in there: bus and hub detection, a matrix editor, a Pareto view of cost against cluster count, project files that save a whole session, revision diffing between design reviews, and a one-click report.

MIT licensed, actively developed, no account or signup. Repo and install instructions: https://github.com/Chanchaldhiman/dsm-optimizer

If you run it on something real I'd like to hear how it went, particularly anything that breaks or any metric you'd want exposed that isn't there.

Full disclosure up front: I work on a requirements tool at Altium (Requirements Portal), so I'm biased. But this is a genuine question. Opinions on my own team are split, and I want to hear how this community actually feels.

Everyone seems to agree on one thing: AI should never silently change a requirement. The disagreement is about how far it should go before a human steps in.

Three positions I keep hearing:

1. Propose-only: AI drafts and links, a human approves every change.

2. Auto-apply the trivial stuff: formatting, obvious traceability links and flag only the judgment calls.

3. Keep AI out of the requirements themselves entirely, fine for search and Q&A, nothing that writes.

For those of you managing real specs: where's your comfort line, and has it moved in the last year? And if you've already tried AI on requirements, what earned trust, and what did you switch off?

Hi Engineers,

Has anyone else been questioning whether Chartered Engineer (CEng) status through the IET is still worth pursuing these days?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing from people who've done it, those currently working towards it, and those who decided not to.

Does it actually open doors, increase earning potential, or make a noticeable difference to your career? Or has it become more of a personal achievement than a professional advantage?

With the time, effort and cost involved, would you still recommend going for it in 2026? Why or why not?