Special Sessions

Organizers: Romain Pinquié, Olivia Penas, and Vincent Chapurlat

Description: This special session, organised under the auspices of the INCOSE French Chapter AFIS, highlights original research contributions from the French systems engineering community. As part of INCOSE’s ongoing mission to advance the theory and practice of systems engineering, this session aspires to convene cutting-edge academic and applied research through collaboration among academia, industry, and government stakeholders. The session provides a unique platform for researchers affiliated with the INCOSE French Chapter to present new theories, methodologies, frameworks, tools, and case studies that address the complex challenges encountered in modern systems engineering. This special session represents an opportunity for researchers in systems engineering to showcase their work, engage with peers worldwide, and contribute to advancing the discipline. Researchers affiliated with the INCOSE French Chapter, or those who engage closely with its academic and industrial ecosystem, are particularly encouraged to participate in this session and leave a lasting impact on the global systems engineering landscape.

Topics of Interest: Contributions span a wide range of topics, including Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Patterns Based Systems Engineering (PBSE), Model-Based Product Line Engineering (MBPLE), System of Systems Engineering, systems architecting, early verification and validation, AI for systems engineering, human-systems integration, digital continuity for systems engineering, digital twin, digital thread, engineering sustainable systems, requirements engineering, computational system design synthesis, systems modelling and simulation, model checking, etc.

Types of Contributions: For this special session, we prioritize academic submissions comprising a complete manuscript (up to 8 pages) that addresses theoretical challenges, technological advancements, methodologies, and applications. A clear statement of contribution is required. The papers should also include an introduction, background, theory, results, and validation. Practitioner submissions and Academic forum submissions ought to be directed more appropriately to the primary track of the conference.

The defense and security applications of system engineering special session will address defense and security challenges related to system engineering, modeling and simulation and experimental tests.
Among the topics of interests:
• System analysis and studies
• Simulation as a Service
• Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) / Digital Engineering Applications
• Systems concepts and integration
• Applied vehicle technology
• Modelling and simulation
• Operations Research and Analysis
• Operations Decision Support
• Wargaming and AI-enabled MDO wargame
• Interoperability
• Digital Twins for defense
• Uncrewed & Autonomous Systems — Trends & Challenges
• State of the Art in AI Applied to Military Training and Education
• Goal-Driven, Multi-Fidelity Approaches for Military Vehicle System-Level Design
• Distributed Interactive Simulation
• High Level Architecture for M&S (HLA)
• NATO M&S Development and opportunities
• Mission driven SoS Engineering
• AI in critical systems
• Combat systems, advance air defense
• Land forces
Finally, the session will also call for papers proposing new research directions and tutorial papers in the Defense applications of system engineering.

The system of systems community and the robotics community evolve in parallel, although they share a large number of common concepts and related issues. The strong emergence of autonomous robotics swarms, in particular heterogeneous multi domains autonomous robotics swarms (aerial, terrestrial, maritime) is both an opportunity for roboticists to appropriate the concepts of systems of systems engineering, and an opportunity to challenge the commonly established results of systems of systems engineering in the field, by experimenting on highly reconfigurable autonomous swarms. 

This special session will address the topic of system of systems engineering in robotics with an emphasis on foundations for sustainable and adaptive autonomous systems. These foundations should enrich the currently existing system of systems taxonomy and governance standards (ISO/IEC/IEEE 21841:2019, 21839:2019,21840:2019) to take into account large scale AI-driven robotics autonomous systems trends and propose both theoretical and methodological frameworks to allow optimized robotics systems design under resources constraints among them energy. 

This session is open to researchers and industry practitioners who have demonstrated the value of systems engineering and systems architecture methods, concepts and standards for the design of autonomous robotic systems or systems of systems, or conversely to those who have identified their limits, ambiguities, gaps by relying on practical or theoretical case studies from robotics.