NNT : 2017SACLC050 These` de Doctorat de l'Universite´ Paris-Saclay Prepar´ ee´ a` CentraleSupelec´ Ecole Doctorale n◦573(Interfaces) Approches Interdisciplinaires: Fondements, Applications et Innovation Sp´ecialit´edu Doctorat: Informatique M. Mohammed BOUGAA Une Approche Bas´eesur les Processus et Dirig´eepar les Comp´etencespour l'Education en Ing´enieriedes Syst`emes Soutenue `a" Cergy-Pontoise ", Le 29 Septembre 2017. Composition du Jury : M. Claude LAPORTE Rapporteur (Pr) Ecole de Technologie Sup´erieure Montr´eal,Qu´ebec, Canada M. Eric LEVRAT Rapporteur (Pr) Universit´ede Lorraine Nancy, France Mme. Marija JANKOVIC Examinatrice (Pr) CentraleSup´elec Pr´esidente du Jury Ch^atenay-Malabry, France Mme. Odile MORNAS Examinatrice (Ing) Thales university Jouy-en-Josas, France M. Rory V.O'CONNOR Examinateur (Pr) School of Computing Dublin City University, Ireland M. Alain RIVIERE Directeur Institut sup´erieurde m´ecanique de de Th`ese(Pr) Paris, Saint-Ouen, France M. Hubert KADIMA Co-Directeur Ecole Int des Sciences et du Traite- de Th`ese(Dr) ment de l'Information, Cergy, France M. Stefan BORNHOFEN Encadrant Ecole Int des Sciences et du Traite- de Th`ese(Dr) ment de l'Information, Cergy, France 1 NNT : 2017SACLC050 PhD Thesis of Paris-Saclay University Prepared At CentraleSupelec´ Doctoral school n◦573(Interfaces) Interdisciplinary Approaches: Foundations, Applications and Innovation PhD Specialty: Computer Science M. Mohammed BOUGAA A Process-Centered and Competency-Driven Approach for Systems Engineering Education Defended at " Cergy-Pontoise ", On: September 29th, 2017. Thesis jury : M. Claude LAPORTE Reviewer (Pr) Ecole de Technologie Sup´erieure Montr´eal,Qu´ebec, Canada M. Eric LEVRAT Reviewer (Pr) Universit´ede Lorraine Nancy, France Mme. Marija JANKOVIC Examiner (Pr) CentraleSup´elec Jury President Ch^atenay-Malabry, France Mme. Odile MORNAS Examiner (Eng) Thales university Jouy-en-Josas, France M. Rory V.O'CONNOR Examiner (Pr) School of Computing Dublin City University, Ireland M. Alain RIVIERE Thesis Institut sup´erieurde m´ecanique de Director (Pr) Paris, Saint-Ouen, France M. Hubert KADIMA Thesis Ecole Int des Sciences et du Traite- Co-Director (Dr) ment de l'Information, Cergy, France M. Stefan BORNHOFEN Thesis Ecole Int des Sciences et du Traite- Supervisor (Dr) ment de l'Information, Cergy, France 2 3 Acknowledgment Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis director Prof. Alain RIVIERE for the supervision of this work, for his patience, and orientation, also for providing me with the necessary resources. His guidance helped me all the time of research and writing of this thesis. I thank him especially for trusting me and giving me all the necessary liberty and autonomy while being here to validate my research directions and decisions. Besides my thesis director, I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Stefan BORNHOFEN, for being always here to support me and for the numbered discussions that led to the completion of this work. I thank him for pushing me to ask the right questions, to be sure I'm on the right paths, I also thank him for all his proofreading of my papers and this thesis. My sincere thanks also goes to Prof Samir. LAMOURI and Prof. Samir GARBAYA, who gave me opportunities to exchange with them around this work, their insightful comments and encouragement were very helpful. I also thank Mr. Claude LAPORTE and Mr. Eric LEVRAT for accepting to review this report, and Mrs Marija JANKOVIC, Mrs Odile MORNAS and Mr. Rory V.O'Connor for accepting to be part of the jury of my thesis defense. My sincere thanks also goes to Faida MHENNI,Moncef HAMMADI, Jean Yves CHO- LEY, Alexis FRANCOIS, Antoine LANTHONY, Antoine BRUNNER, and all Supmeca staff, for their help and assistance during this thesis, and especially for facilitating the platform experimentation, without forgetting to thank all my friends and colleagues at EISTI. I also thank all the staff of Interface doctoral school at CentraleSupelec and es- pecially Mrs Suzanne Thuron, who had always been here to respond to my inquiries and questions, I thank her for her professionalism and sense of service. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family: my parents, my wife, and to my brothers and sister for supporting me spiritually throughout the three years of this thesis and my life in general. I would like to thank my parents for their love, encourage- ment, and support in all my pursuits, and for their faithful support during the final stages of this Ph.D. And My Sister and Brothers, for their support. Words cannot express how grateful I am to my supportive, encouraging, and patient wife Fatma, in addition to her thesis preparation, and spending her nights taking care of our baby, she always found the time to review my papers, to discuss about the direction i took, ...etc., sometimes, she even appeared understanding my work better than me :). I dedicate this thesis to my adorable daughter, "Nour Filastine", my treasure, who came into the world one year ago to embellish us with happiness and challenges. 4 Abstract Dealing with today's complex systems requires highly qualified systems engineers. How- ever, in order to be effective as systems engineers, engineering students need practical and real world experiences with such complex systems, in addition to the necessary knowledge in their traditional engineering discipline. In fact, Systems Engineering (SE) education is as much about skills and processes, as it is about knowledge transfer. This makes teach- ing SE a very challenging task where the complexity of the engineered systems has to be considered together with SE complexity itself. Significant efforts have been made the last two decades in order to deal with this complexity. Attention has been paid to enhance both SE practices and SE education practices. These efforts are provided by organizations using SE, as well as by academic institutions dealing with engineering and SE education. They led to the production of standards, standards documentation, processes assessment models, competency models, competencies assessment resources and more, while improv- ing SE practices within industry and organizations. By organizations we address all the different fields, other than industry, where systems engineering is applied, such as govern- ment departments and agencies...etc. In addition, many practical attempts addressed SE education at undergraduate, graduate, post-graduate, and professional levels. This thesis surveys the current practices and advancements in SE education, and concludes that there is no common conventional learning path for this discipline (if we consider it as such). One of our most important finding is that there is no conventional education solution, among academia and industrials/organizations, capable of respond- ing to different industry and organization's challenges, for seeking well-trained systems engineers, or specialized engineers with the minimum viable knowledge about the fun- damental principles of SE. A solution that can produce systems engineers with different depth levels of expertise, and that should be easily transmissible from a university to another, and from a specific engineering discipline to another. We tried to consider some basic questions such as: what pedagogical model should be used ? what role technology and educators should play in a perfect SE educational environment? which tools should be used? We ended up proposing a novel solution for SE education (an approach with its sup- porting web-based platform). The proposed approach is based on the recommendations of academic and industrial communities. It is centered around the use of SE standardized processes and at the same time very adaptive, with learning scenarios that can be driven by the acquired or to-be-taught SE competencies. The proposed solution is a web based platform that has been developed to support this novel approach within a distant Project Based Learning (PBL) environment. Finally, we put this solution to the test, firstly by questioning a sample of undergraduate students and their educators about this approach and its platform features, and then through another sample of doctoral students using it in the context of an introductory course to systems engineering, within a Project Based Learning (PBL) course. Students using this solution will be able to not only engineer the requested system in a distant and collaborative way, but also to engineer it the right way. The solution aims to ease the learning at the same time of fundamental principles and processes of systems engineering, along with communication, team management, collabo- ration, and related soft skills. On the other hand, educators will be able to better manage their learning scenarios, training resources, and the expected outcomes. Last, educators and students' organizations using this solution will be able to manage and normalize the competencies to be acquired by their future systems engineers at every level. Keywords Systems Engineering, Systems Engineering Education, Systems Engineering Standards, Project-Based Learning, Lifecycle Model, Competency Models. 5 R´esum´e Faire face aux syst`emescomplexes d'aujourd'hui n´ecessitedes ing´enieurssyst`emeshaute- ment qualifi´es. Mais pour ^etreefficace en tant qu'ing´enieursyst`eme,les ´etudiants en diff´erentes disciplines d'ing´enieriestraditionnelles ont besoin d'une exp´eriencepratique et r´eelledans ce type de syst`emescomplexes, en plus des connaissances th´eoriquesn´ecessaires dans leur discipline. L'´educationdans le domaine de l'ing´enieriedes syst`emes(IS) concerne aussi bien les comp´etences et les processus, que les faits transf´erableset les connaissances. Cela rend l'education en IS un sujet tr`esdifficile, avec un besoin de consid´erer`ala fois la complexit´edes syst`emes`aconcevoir, ainsi que la complexit´eet l'abstraction de l'IS dans certains de ses principes fondamentaux. Des efforts consid´erables ont ´et´eaccomplis afin d'am´eliorerles pratiques de cette discipline et pour faire face `ala complexit´edes syst`emes actuels et `al'´educationen IS.