Presentation Abstract - As the INCOSE Smart Cities Initiative prepares its first work products, it is finding seemingly diverse points of view in several practicing definitions of the Smart City. There is no right or wrong model. Each model has a spectacular view of the city, and each model can offer valuable information (from its limited viewpoint) on how the city operates and how it could improve. When modeling, analyzing and optimizing the operations of a complex system, its important to model the system from various viewpoints. This, of course, is a lesson from the ancient fable of ‘the blind men and the elephant’; that we cannot claim an absolute truth based on one true but limited viewpoint while ignoring other equally true but limited viewpoints. Models are used in MBSE to map and keep track of the myriad butterfly effects caused by design and operational changes in complex real systems. But a single model is only a limited viewpoint, for the very reason that the real system it attempts to model is so complex. Comparing the complex system from various MBSE modeling viewpoints can help bring clarity. In this presentation, we compare the viewpoints of two prominent Smart City definitions; Deloitte's viewpoint based on the idea that Smart cities emerge as the result of many Smart Solutions across all sectors of society, and TUSS's viewpoint based on the idea that a Smart city is a city that has the ability to identify its problems and its root causes promptly and remove the root causes by generating, and processing engineered quality data in a continuous and inclusive manner. A comparison graphic illustrates how these are just two of the many views of the same elephant.

The March chapter meeting will feature Troy Peterson, VP at System Strategy, Inc.; past President of the Michigan chapter; and INCOSE Associate Director for Systems Engineering Transformation giving a presentation on Digital Engineering and Transformation.

A presentation on “Finding the STEM: An Analysis of Children’s Activities for Systems Engineering Principles”

A presentation on the INCOSE Systems Engineering Professional Certification Program and shares experiences regarding assembling and submitting their certification packages by a couple of our own chapter members.

C-NO Chapter Annual General Meeting

Annual Festive Winter Holiday Extravaganza – Home Edition

Presentation on use of MBSE methods to provide requirements for a new use of an existing product

A discussion of famous failures and the impact of integration on these failures

A presentation regarding the application of systems thinking/principles to resiliency for small communities, associated with a power outage.