# Systems Engineering and the META Program

I periodically look for information on [systems engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering). This time I came across a powerpoint presentation from the MIT Open Courseware course [Fundamentals of Systems Engineering](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-842-fundamentals-of-systems-engineering-fall-2015/lecture-notes/MTI16_842F15_Ses12_FutofSE.pdf). Professor de Weck, who taught the course, had done some research on state-of-the-art methods developed as part of DARPA's META Program.

A few years ago DARPA wrapped up the program, designed to speed up delivery of cyber-electro-mechanical systems (war machines) by 5x. Since the parent program [Adaptive Vehicle Make](https://www.darpa.mil/program/adaptive-vehicle-make) seems to have concluded without producing a vehicle, I infer the META Program lost its funding at the same time.

The work it produced appears to be adjacent to our interests along several dimensions though, so I thought I would bring it to the community's attention. The pitch for the program, taken from the abstract of [de Weck's paper](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1016.1278&rep=rep1&type=pdf):

> The method claims to achieve this speedup by a combination of three main mechanisms:

> 1\. The deliberate use of layers of abstraction. High-level functional requirements are used to explore architectures immediately rather than waiting for downstream level 2,3,4 ... requirements to be defined.

> 2\. The development and use of an extensive and trusted component (C2M2L) model library. Rather than designing all components from scratch, the META process allows importing component models directly from a library in order to quickly compose functional designs.

> 3\. The ability to find emergent behaviors and problems ahead of time during virtual Verification and Validation (V&V) and generating designs that are correct-by-construction allows a more streamlined design process and avoids costly design iterations that often lead to expensive design changes.

Which is to say they very carefully architect the system, use known-to-be-good components, and employ formal verification to catch problems early. In the paper a _simulation_ of the META workflow successfully achieved a 4.4x development speedup compared to the same project's actual development using traditional methods.

There are a bunch of individual directions explored which are of interest. Some that struck me were:

*   A [metric for complexity](https://cps-vo.org/node/2667).
*   A [metric for adaptability](https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a552867.pdf).
*   Stuff for [quantitative verification methods](http://qav.cs.ox.ac.uk/projects/darpa-prismatic/publications.php).
*   Stuff for [complexity reduction and verification](http://loonwerks.com/projects/meta.html).

It looks like the repository for the program's outputs is [here](https://cps-vo.org/node/2243/browser). A missile engineer trying to apply the method to healthcare is [here](https://www.incose.org/docs/default-source/working-groups/healthcare/public-library/2018-se-in-healthcare-conference/improving-operating-room-design-through-innovative-systems-engineering-methodology.pdf?sfvrsn=f50897c6_2). Reducing healthcare costs _is_ rocket science!

In a nutshell it contains a whole bunch of things we have long discussed all in a single package, and now there are a few people out and about trying to get parts into practice.