A systematic and practical method for selecting systems engineering tools

The complexity of many types of systems has grown considerably over the last decades. Using appropriate systems engineering tools therefore becomes increasingly important. Starting the tool selection process can be intimidating because organizations often only have a vague idea about what they need. The tremendous number of available tools makes it difficult to get an overview and identify the best choice. Selecting wrong tools due to inappropriate analysis can have severe impact on the success of the company. This paper presents a systematic method for selecting systems engineering tools based on thorough analyses of the actual needs and the available tools. Grouping needs into categories, allow us to obtain a comprehensive set of requirements for the tools. The entire model-based systems engineering discipline was categorized for a modeling tool case to enable development of a tool specification. Correlating requirements and tool capabilities, enables us to identify the best tool for singletool scenarios or the best set of tools for multi-tool scenarios. In both scenarios, we use gap analysis to prevent selection of infeasible tools. We used the method to select a traceability tool that has been in successful operation since 2013 at GN Hearing. We further utilized the method to select a set of tools that we used on pilot cases at GN Hearing for modeling, simulating and formally verifying embedded systems.