Towards a Process Reference Model for the Industrial Solutions Business: Integrating Reuse and Product-orientation in the Context of Systems Engineering

Industrial engineering as a specialization of systems engineering is concerned with the engineering of industrial solutions like power plants or airport logistics systems. In today’s business environment, the industrial solutions business is faced with high cost and productivity pressure, increasing complexity, and highly demanding customers. Transforming this business from the project-based development of a customer-specific solution to the customization of an underlying ‘solution product’ and fostering reuse in general are regarded highly promising approaches to tackle these challenges. Within this background, we present key results from the ongoing work to develop an ISO/IEC 15504 conformant process reference model for the industrial solutions business. The work is based on the integration of a process reference model for reuse in industrial engineering and a product-oriented process model for the engineering of industrial solutions. The analysis and mapping of these two models forms the basis for the proposal of the structure and key contents of the envisioned reference model.