Towards a greater understanding of Systems Design and Interoperability between Airbus Commercial and its Suppliers

Abstract As Systems Engineering is now widely developed within our organization, the introduction of Model‐Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods and tools is still a gradual process that Airbus approaches incrementally. In that view, the knowledge and training on the usage of systems modeling tools is still being developed. This paper takes a look into the ways Airbus plans to make MBSE usable and understandable both internally to its engineers and externally to its suppliers. This work presents how Airbus managed a collaboration use case with a supplier from the delivery of a new model‐based specification to the supplier, to the interpretation of a joint modeling effort through a User Interface. This new process has been tested on a passenger seats system and at the time of writing, maturity is still in progress. This paper introduces the different technical concepts necessary to set up such a collaborative model‐based environment, the difficulties encountered along the way as well as future research segments and ways to improve the process.