Digital Engineering Metrics Technical Report SERC

The DoD Digital Engineering (DE) strategy1 outlines five strategic goals for transformation, targeted to “promote the use of digital representations of systems and components and the use of digital artifacts as a technical means of communication across a diverse set of stakeholders, address a range of disciplines involved in the acquisition and procurement of national defense systems, and encourage innovation in the way we build, test, field, and sustain our national defense systems and how we train and shape the workforce to use these practices.”
DE is defined as ‘‘an integrated digital approach that uses authoritative sources of systems’ data and models as a continuum across disciplines to support lifecycle activities from concept through disposal. A DE ecosystem is an interconnected infrastructure, environment, and methodology that enables the exchange of digital artifacts from an authoritative source of truth.”2 Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is a subset of DE, defined as “the formalized application of modeling to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later life cycle phases.”3 The terms DE and MBSE are used interchangeably throughout this report.