Prof. de Weck speaks at MITRE

March 26, 2005

Prof. Olivier de Weck was the invited lecturer in the MITRE Corporation monthly Technology Speakers Series on March 23rd at their McLean, Virginia, campus. He spoke about the topic of “Supersize Me? … or Architecting the Evolution of Engineering Systems.”

Rather than designing systems for “best guess” requirements based on forecasts of future demand, there is significant interest in staging projects and deploying them gradually as a function of actual needs. For systems requiring large capital investments, with potentially high switching costs, the ability to be scaled in size and capability must be architected into such systems from the beginning.

Prof. de Weck spoke about a new analytical framework to think about and quantify the staged deployment problem in the context of satellite constellations as well as large, ground-based telescope arrays.

MITRE manages three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs): one for the Department of Defense (known as the DOD Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence FFRDC), one for the Federal Aviation Administration (the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development), and one for the Internal Revenue Service (the Center for Enterprise Modernization). An example of a large scale system requiring potentially stepwise upgrades that is of interest to MITRE and the FAA is the national air traffic control system.

The lecture was attended by 200 MITRE employees locally and was streamed to 20 of MITRE’s 60 remote sites. MIT’s Engineering Systems Division and MITRE Corporation are seeking to develop a close research cooperation in the area of architecting large scale Engineering Systems.