What industry wants: model-based systems engineering
A course takes students from customer concept to design or prototype inside two semesters, often mentored by engineers at big name corporate sponsors.
Experts
George Halow
In March 2020, George Halow set out to close a significant gap between industry and academia. A professor of practice in aerospace engineering and former Ford executive, he had plans for a course giving undergrads hands-on experiences with technology that was rapidly becoming the industry gold standard for complex product development.
But it launched deep in the pre-vaccine stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Halow had to be scrappy finding space and equipment, with the promise of up to $15,000 when the department could get some money together.
Two weeks into the pilot, he got a call from one of the course’s industrial partners. Siemens wanted to help fund the course. The rep was a little cagey about the amount, so Halow asked, “Should I be sitting down?”
Siemens was putting up $100,000. For the first time, a dedicated lab seemed possible. Within a couple of months, other members of the aerospace department’s industrial board pledged another $200,000. The Model-based Systems Engineering Leadership Lab was launched in September 2021, a first-of-its-kind facility for aerospace engineering students.
What exactly does it teach? Model-based systems engineering, or MBSE, models an entire engineering system digitally before anything is built. With huge potential for cost savings in new engineering designs, it has rapidly risen to prominence in the aerospace, automotive, naval and defense sectors.
“MBSE really forces you to think differently, more holistically, about the product you’re helping engineer,” said David Taylor, Vice President for Industrial Strategy, Marketing and Global Execution at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “This program really gives the University of Michigan graduates a big advantage.”
Industry loves the approach in part because it enables people with minimal prior training to contribute quickly and effectively to complex efforts. In the course, students as young as 19 work on projects from heavy hitters like Leidos, Boeing, Blue Origin, GE Aerospace, and more, with a degree of success that keeps the list of partners growing year after year.
“Students get an understanding of the entire lifecycle—from customer concept, to establishing requirements, to designing, to building, to validating and to flying—all in an academic year,” said Halow.
Building a layered student experience
Since the pilot, Halow has expanded into a series of courses. The first two terms, soon to be called 388 for both semesters rather than the original 288 and 388, introduce the students to each step in the process over a project that spans two terms. It follows the “just in time” management philosophy, so the students learn the model-based system engineering principles they’ll need for the next step in the life cycle of their project and immediately apply them.
Students who thrive in the first two terms may be selected to act as project leads, enrolling in 488. Aware that women are more likely than men to underestimate their own readiness for leadership roles, Halow invites students who have excelled to apply to the 488 course.
He is effusive in his praise of the MBSE students, and his high opinion has outside validation: Five students enrolled in the last three years have been recognized nationally on Aviation Week’s 20 Twenties list.
One of these is Maria Reitz, currently an instructor for the MBSE courses as she earns a master of science in engineering degree in aerospace engineering. Yesterday, she presented on the course series with Halow at the Siemens International Leadership Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz.
During her year taking 288 and 388, she worked on a project with Collins Aerospace, aiming to secure wheelchairs inside planes so that wheelchair users could avoid being separated from their mobility devices during air travel.
Halow suggested she apply to 488 and offered her a new project developing a hybrid powertrain for an aircraft using a gas-burning engine, battery and electric propeller, working with another big name in aerospace.
“As someone deeply passionate about sustainable aviation, it was incredible to be able to co-lead a project centered around hybrid-electrification, especially when that project was done with Pratt & Whitney,” Reitz said.
Now, as a graduate student instructor, she is no longer dedicated to one project. Instead, she mentors the team leads on how to support each team.
“Last term, I was talking to the team working as a customer for a senior capstone course team at the University of Connecticut, finding out what it’s like to work with a supplier. To do that, they need to get deliverables from the team at the University of Connecticut. That’s the dynamic you just don’t get in a lot of educational spaces,” said Reitz.
Another of the Aviation Week 20 Twenties is Morgan Serra, who was in on the ground floor with the original pilot course. She even helped build the lab over the summer before the course series began in earnest, interning with Halow.
For her project in the pilot, she worked on a collaboration with the humanitarian organization Air Serv, which is aiming to develop smaller, autonomous, electric planes. These would help with search and rescue missions and deliveries of food and medicine in areas where it is too dangerous to send a human pilot, or where a plane as large as their usual Cessna Caravans can’t land.
At the time, Serra was designing the fuselage of the plane as CAD (computer-aided design) and manufacturing director. In the process of making the preliminary design, the team discovered that some of Air Serv’s requirements weren’t feasible and gained experience negotiating a new way forward with their customer. In the second year, with Serra as chief engineer, the team developed plans to begin manufacturing.
“It was just really cool to see the whole process jam packed into one year, and all those behind-the-scenes things I didn’t know existed, outside of doing math and designing an aircraft,” said Serra, now a systems engineer in space systems at Leidos.
The team continues on, in and out of the class, as the Humanitarian UAV Mission in the student group Michigan Sustainability Applications for Aerospace Vehicle Engineering (MSAAVE).
Serra continued to help Halow build the course series as it grew into 288 and 388, staying on as a student instructor, and then a graduate student instructor mentoring the first 488 cohort.
“Seeing how those students interacted with 288 and 388 students added another layer. Each project has a structured leadership system, and each team has a couple of leads that have gone through the course and have that knowledge to help the younger engineers,” she said.
She also noted the technical success of the teams—before the course moved on to more specific projects developed in partnership with sponsors, some teams entered competitions. They earned distinctions such as first place for their design report in the 2021 AIAA Design, Build, Fly competition and the best entry for a lunar sample containment system in NASA’s 2022 RASC-AL competition.
Fostering professionalism and commitment
Because the course series revolves around real-world projects, it generates a sense of purpose that typical lectures and labs can’t replicate. The latest MBSE Aviation Week honoree is Elijah Simpson, a graduating senior in aerospace engineering who will return for a master’s in space science in the fall. He has been involved with the MBSE courses since the first term 288 was offered. Working on Blue Origin projects, he was selected as a 488 team lead and is serving as an instructor this year.
He’s taken to teaching, enjoying the opportunity to share what he has learned with the students, and he also appreciates that the faculty leads, modeling good management themselves, are receptive to feedback on improving the design of the course. Simpson expressed both initiative and ownership in helping enact changes—in particular, keeping the courses up to date.
“We pride ourselves on trying our best to equip and train our students on the latest digital software,” said Simpson. “When a new tool emerges, we change from legacy software to help students develop skills that will continue to be useful ten years from now.”
But it’s not just the long-tenured students who feel a personal investment. Last year, a team worked well past the end of the spring term. They were designing a rocket that would enable aerospace engineers to test out their payloads—often self-contained experiments sent to space—with a real launch. This enables teams to discover any issues, such as software bugs, poor quality parts and breakage due to vibrations and stress—and address them ahead of the blast into space.
The team worked with mentors from Blue Origin, designing the rocket for clients at the Michigan Exploration Laboratory (MXL) and the U-M student rocketry team, MASA. By the time the course ended in late April, the team had only just completed their first rigorous test, which revealed problems that they needed to solve. Launching in May would have meant facing bad weather with a rushed final assembly.
“We knew having those additional parts and integrating them correctly would give us the greatest chance of success, and that’s what we really cared about,” said Matt Nurick, lead avionics and payload engineer of the project, and a junior in aerospace engineering. He has an internship lined up with SpaceX for this summer.
Instead of risking a failed launch, many team members worked over the summer and through the fall semester, fully reconvening in October to see their rocket fly. Blue Origin stuck with them, continuing to advise the team leads past the end of the term. After sending the rocket up from an amateur rocketry site in rural Muskegon, MI, the team watched anxiously for the red parachute to deploy. Only then did they know that the experiment was likely a success, and the rocket would come back with usable data. The rocket was testing MASA’s prototype flight computer, for which Nurick was lead engineer—about half the MBSE rocket team were also MASA members.
The team was pleased that the mission went to plan and that the launch validated their rigorous simulations. Flying nearly a mile into the sky, their rocket peaked at 4500 feet and experienced roughly four times the Earth’s acceleration due to gravity on launch. If they were to continue working on the rocket, they would trouble-shoot the backup systems, one of which didn’t deploy. However, the rocket has been transferred to MXL, which will handle the troubleshooting and use it to launch-test small satellites, called cubesats, that they build and send to space.
While professional certifications in MBSE are available, Michigan Aero is among the few offering any programming at the undergraduate level. Getting started early is paying off for both students and their future employers.
“It’s been cool to see how it’s grown, looking at the wall of sponsors here to my left,” said Simpson, gesturing in the lab. “When I first got here, we had three or four on the wall. Now we have twelve.”
Collectively, those sponsors have provided $1.6 million in funding. They’re investing heavily because they see the return, often recruiting x88 students for internships and permanent positions.
“Every student that I have interacted with has a level of business acumen that I would value at two years of working experience,” said Kimberly Harrington, president of solutions and technologies at Belcan, a Cognizant company.
“This is not everywhere. Having early-career, new hires that can be counted on to organize and run a meeting, communicate effectively within a professional environment, and understand implications of cross-functional interactions and processes is a major benefit.”
Gökçin Çınar, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering, and Jonathan Van Noord, lead engineer in research at the Space Physics Research Laboratory, also serve as x88 instructors.