The INCOSE UK Rail Interest Group (RIG) is proud to be working with the IET to put on a one-day seminar at the IET's premises in Savoy Place, London on 11th November 2009 in 'Systems Engineering in Railways'. The seminar, delivered by senior figures within the rail industry, will illustrate the manner in which systems engineering techniques are becoming increasingly essential for modern railway engineers. Subtitled - ‘Making it work for you’, the seminar will be of value to anyone needing to understand the benefits of systems engineering techniques in a railway environment as well as providing an opportunity for systems engineers to explore the current state of the art in rail systems engineering. There is an optional, pre-seminar tutorial to ensure that the seminar is fully accessible to the non-expert so, after you have taken a look yourself, please consider passing the details on to any colleagues who might benefit from a better appreciation of systems engineering in railways. The programme is available at http://www.theiet.org/events/2009/systems-engineering-prog-280909.pdf and more general details are on the IET web-site at http://www.theiet.org/events/2009/railway-systems.cfm. You will also find details of how to book your place at the seminar on this page. Please note that you cannot book for this event via INCOSE UK - the IET is handling all bookings. If you cannot find the answer to your question on one of these web pages, please contact the RIG Chair, Bruce Elliott on bruce.elliott@arbutus-tc.co.uk

Does the manner in which systems engineering is carried out depend entirely upon the context in which it is done, or are there some universal principles which will always apply? This interactive workshop event will seek to tease out what the differences are in the practice of systems engineering across different domains, assess why they have come about, and see whether anything can be learned from the transfer of knowledge.

INCOSE 2010 International Workshop

There is a common perception that a conflict exists between weapon system integrity and interoperability. Is this true or are there opportunities for ensuring that surety and risks can be balanced to achieve interoperability? Areas where this is a major issue include ISTAR, Directed Energy Weapons, and Spacebased Systems. In order to address this question, a one-day unclassified conference is being organised by the Royal Aeronautical Society's Weapon Systems and Technology Group in conjunction with QinetiQ at Boscombe Down. Papers are invited to discuss the issues associated with balancing these apparently divergent requirements. Abstracts of 200 - 500 words typed and double spaced on A4 paper should be submitted by Friday 3rd July 2009.

Click here to register via Eventbrite In his presentation “Eating the Elephant: ETCS Requirements for GB railway” John Alexander of Network Rail described the Reference Design process that was implemented to elicit the GB specific requirements for the configuration of the ETCS product. This involved the production of some 31 documents to describe various aspects of operation on the GB railway and the ETCS capabilities to be applied to those. From these 31 documents 5 requirement sets were consolidated. This presentation follows on from John’s and describes a number of toolsets developed by WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff to support and automate the processes for consolidation and documentation of the Reference Design itself and subsequent requirement specifications. Click here to register via Eventbrite

The Annual General Meeting.

Over the past two years Paul Shakspeare has been leading a project funded by the South West RDA to identify and resolve strategic skills gaps in the aerospace sector. As a result of this work a training and development strategy to respond to the skill shortages and professional development needs critical to the successful delivery of complex systems has been formulated. This session gives systems engineers, project managers and HR professionals a chance to feed into this process and help steer regional strategy and its associated funding.

The Systems Engineering Competency Framework and Guidelines documents were developed in response to an issue identified by the INCOSE UK Advisory Board (UKAB).whose member organisations wanted a common language with which to describe and discuss the competencies that are required to conduct good systems engineering. The objective was ‘to have a measurable set of competencies for systems engineering which will achieve national recognition and will be useful to the enterprises represented by the UKAB’.

INCOSE UK´s London Local Group and The Institution of Engineering and Technology through the Systems Engineering Network have joined forces to reflect on this draft standard of a quality model. “In the new model for software quality in the draft ISO/IEC CD 25010 standard, the concept of quality in use has been broadened to embrace a wider range of issues than was common in usability” (Bevan, 2009)

After a successful series of evening presentations, the RIG is now organising a day-long workshop to explore in more detail three difficult questions that rail organisations face in increasing their take-up of systems engineering: 1. How should we apply systems engineering principles in the rail environment? 2. How do we find enough rail systems people? 3. How do we write systems engineering into contracts?