Developing an Academic Case Study to Advance Digital Engineering

The need for academic case studies to train the workforce on digital engineering is the driving motivation for this research. In this context, a “case study” is a realistic but fictitious set of documents and models in a digital environment that allows students to gain “hands-on” experience in the classroom. The US Department of Defense (DoD) released a strategy in 2018 that includes the need for training as a pillar for implementing digital engineering. The research represented here strives to advance digital engineering curricula. In the past, the research team has published and presented a vision for the Simulation Training Environment for Digital Engineering (STEDE) that includes a description of plans to leverage case studies to advance student knowledge relative to the Digital Engineering Competency Framework (DECF). The research plan for this work introduces the notion of the Bulldog unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) system and associated mission as one of the case studies (Bulldog is a fictitious unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) system used to detect and clear obstacles. The Bulldog models originated with the Defense Acquisition University (DAU). Originally developed using traditional acquisition artifacts in support of DAU’s systems engineering courses, these artifacts have been digitized using SysML and the Cameo tool to support digital acquisition training. DAU is continuing to evolve these models to support hands-on learning throughout the DAU curriculum. The SERC is supporting this evolution for DAU training as well as using Bulldog for research purposes. We greatly appreciate the partnership with DAU, in particular the efforts of David Pearson, James Roche, John Snoderly, Robert Raygan, Troy Snow, John Quintana, Aaron Jacobson, and Robert Arthur.). A past research article discussed the preliminary usage of Bulldog for curriculum on digital (acquisition) artifacts, such as the systems engineering plan (SEP). This research asserts that digital engineering curricula should include facets of the current state (text-based artifacts), digitization (conversion of text to models), digitalization (reconceptualization that takes advantage of the power of data and models), and a serialization of the transformation. This article provides insights into our digital transformation of the Bulldog case study and a simple example of the serialized transformation of operational scenarios from text-based to model-based formats.