Practicing and Assessing Formal Systems Competencies in ECE Senior Design

Systems engineering concepts were included for the first time this year in the Electrical and Computer Engineering sequence of senior design courses at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. In this year-long program, teams of three to four students complete an externally sponsored project. In this year’s class, a subset of the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) Competencies was introduced at the beginning of the course, and assigned as model artifacts to appear in project deliverables. This paper presents an early report of a work in progress, and as such, it primarily describes the process of transforming the sequence of courses and the assignments that were used to provide practice with the MBSE Competencies. Qualitative assessments are included in order to provide some indication of the students’ abilities to use the MBSE Competencies. The goal is to use these qualitative results to help produce meaningful rubrics that can be used next year to provide a more quantitative analysis of student performance. 1.0 Introduction Systems engineering concepts were included for the first time this year in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) senior capstone design sequence of courses at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in order to address several challenges. In the senior year, students take a year-long sequence of courses, ECE460: Engineering Design I, ECE461: Engineering Design II, and ECE462: Engineering Design III. As a 3 credit-hour course in the Fall Quarter, ECE460 is focused on formulating and structuring the problem and then beginning to work on the solution. As a 4-credit-hour course in the Winter Quarter, ECE461 is focused on developing and evaluating the solution. As a 2 credit-hour course in the Spring Quarter, ECE462 is focused on documenting the solution. There is typically one faculty member who manages the entire sequence of courses, and 2–3 additional faculty members who help to supervise teams. Each faculty member involved supervises 3–5 teams for the entire year, and each student team consists of 3–4 students. The department has self-imposed a constraint that all projects must be externally driven or supported. Faculty research projects can be used as long as there is a well-defined goal to which the faculty member will hold the students accountable. As such the variety and types of projects available is dependent upon availability. The senior capstone design course is a challenging experience for both the faculty and the students. For the students, this course is often the first experience in which they have the primary responsibility to formulate and solve a complex open-ended problem over an extended period of time. For the faculty, the challenge is to develop a course structure that teaches students how to break down the open-ended problem into manageable pieces and then formulate a plan for solving those pieces, P ge 24990.2 is equally applicable and useful to a wide variety of projects, provides assessment tools that are an integral part of the process, provides opportunities for students to reflect on the usefulness of the process, is easily learned by faculty who haven’t previously taught the course and don’t have a lot of design experience, minimizes the overhead to faculty in terms of working with the teams and assessing their progress, and minimizes the additional workload on the students. In the past, the course structure depended on the experiences of the faculty supervisors and varied from project to project. This variability and lack of formal structure made it difficult to assess one project relative to another and to maintain consistency from year to year. Throughout the years, various documentation assignments were given in various order and combinations. Other than using these documents to evaluate the student’s solutions to their design problems, they were generally used in an open-loop fashion and there was no formal method of relating the contents of one document to another. Therefore, the act of producing the documentation did not force the students to continually reflect on their efforts in order to improve their results. The lack of a formal design process also meant that these documents often varied in content from project to project, making it difficult for faculty to apply rubrics consistently. During the 2013-2014 Academic Year, model-based systems-engineering (MBSE) competencies were introduced into this electrical engineering senior design sequence in order to address these problems. The generality of systems engineering concepts makes them applicable to a wide variety of projects. The formal process of generating the models gives the students a method for breaking down the open-ended nature of the projects into manageable pieces. This formal process also means that a single design method can be learned by all faculty members and therefore applied consistently to the various projects from year to year. Having a formal process also makes it easier for faculty to work with and assess the variety of projects because there is a common language regardless of the domain-specific knowledge required for the project. The model-based approach allows the instructors to define a minimum set of models that can adequately represent the project, which helps to reduce faculty and student workload. Welldefined dependencies between the models force the students to continually reflect on their understanding of the project as they improve the consistency between the models. Because the models are tangible representations of the students’ work, they are natural assessment instruments that are also integral parts of the design process. As such, the models are less likely to be viewed by the students as “extra unrelated work” than assignments whose only purpose is to provide a grade for the course. This paper describes the process that was used to transform the senior capstone design sequence, the model-based assignments that were introduced, some preliminary qualitative assessment of those assignments, and planned future improvements for each. Page 24990.3 2.0 An Overview of MBSE and Systems Competencies Explicit models have a long history in science and engineering, originally focused on mathematical descriptions of physical phenomena 1 . As human-engineered products became more complex, innovation and adoption cycles shorter, risks more significant, and demands for flexibility greater, systems engineering has emerged (over about 60 years) in domains such as aerospace, automotive, energy and power, telecommunications, medical and health care, advance manufacturing, and otherwise 2-5 . The emergence of explicit model-based methods for systems engineering has been even more recent (over about 20 years), improving on traditional systems engineering approaches in response to these challenges 6-18 . Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) expresses system-level requirements, designs, couplings, risks, and other aspects in explicit data structures, expressed in emerging system-level modeling languages 19-20 . MBSE has special implications for education of engineers, and not only systems engineering specialists. The System Competencies, as a part of the Innovation Competencies have been identified 21-22 in connection with the education of future innovators. Of potential interest to all engineers and innovators, the model-based approach of the Systems Competencies allows undergraduates and less experienced practitioners to more directly address competencies that otherwise had historically demanded accumulation of long and deep experience to develop. Said another way, the model-based Systems Competencies shift the emphasis from intuitive craft to explicit, observable, assessable skill. While a smaller number of systems engineering specialists pursue deeper education and practice in systems engineering, the larger engineering community, across all engineering domains, is the target of the Systems Competencies. The System Competencies are summarized in the related literature 21 as: S1. Describing the target of innovation from a systems perspective; S2. Applying a system stakeholder view of value, trade-offs, and optimization; S3. Understanding system’s interactions and states (modes); S4. Specifying system technical requirements; S5. Creating and analyzing high level design; S6. Assessing solution feasibility, consistency, and completeness; S7. Performing system failure mode and risk analysis; S8. Planning system families, platforms, and product lines; S9. Understanding roles & interdependencies across the innovation process. Each of the System Competencies may be practiced and demonstrated through the use of certain types of system-level model artifacts, lending a tangible flavor. These are further described, Page 24990.4 detailed and illustrated by Appendix B of the related literature 21 . Model-based rubrics for each of the System Competencies are described in Appendix A of the current paper. 3.0 Process for Including Concepts into Senior Design In order to integrate these systems competencies into the senior design sequence, the course content needed to be updated and the four faculty members who would be supervising the course needed to understand them. Much of this work was begun during the summer of 2013 before the competencies were used by these faculty members for the first time. Revision of the course content began by reviewing the assignments from previous years to see how systems competencies could be integrated and assignments reorganized. These assignments are presented in much more detail in the following section. In addition to revising the assignments, the lectures that introduced those assignments also had to be updated. Two two-hour lectures, with interactive exercises for the students were developed during the summer and presented in the first two weeks of ECE460 in the Fall Quarter. The students were asked to come to the lectures wit