MBSE in Aerospace/Defense: Case Study Notes and Dead Ends

Why Aerospace/Defense Matters Here

MBSE adoption is heavily driven by aerospace/defense, and Siemens' own MBSE product page names aerospace/defense as one of three primary trial-environment industries (see mbse-teamcenter-product-positioning.md). This file collects what could actually be verified about real A&D usage — and is honest that most of it is thin.

Confirmed: Military Aerospace Trade Press Coverage of the 2018 Announcement

Military Aerospace (a legitimate aerospace/defense trade publication, independent of Siemens) covered the original Siemens–Obeo System Modeling Workbench announcement: https://www.militaryaerospace.com/commercial-aerospace/article/14229654/siemens-extends-model-based-systems-engineering-solution-to-enhance-innovation

This confirms the announcement (June 4, 2018, Siemens PLM Connection Americas, Phoenix — full detail in mbse-capella-system-modeling-workbench.md) was considered relevant enough to A&D-industry readers for independent trade-press pickup, and frames the tooling as relevant to "complex defense systems engineering workflows" spanning mechanical/electrical/electronic domains. No named A&D customer appears in the article — it reports the vendor announcement, not a deployment.

Confirmed: Thales Is the Origin of ARCADIA/Capella, and Uses It

Thales — a genuine, major aerospace/defense/security systems company — developed the ARCADIA methodology in-house starting around 2000, specifically to move from being an equipment supplier to an integrated-systems supplier, and open-sourced the resulting Capella tool via Eclipse. Thales and Thales Alenia Space are documented (via the Eclipse Capella industry consortium and an independently-published paper, "Deploying Model-Based Systems Engineering in Thales Alenia Space Italia," https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1728/paper14.pdf) as real, substantial users of Capella/ARCADIA for systems architecture work, including an "End-to-End Observation System" use case with operational/system/logical/physical architecture analysis phases.

Important caveat: this is evidence that Thales uses Capella and ARCADIA, which is the open-source modeling engine underneath Siemens' System Modeling Workbench (see mbse-capella-system-modeling-workbench.md). It is not evidence that Thales uses Teamcenter or SMW specifically — nothing found in this pass confirms Thales runs its Capella models through Siemens Teamcenter. Thales is an independent, competing systems house; using open-source Capella does not imply any Siemens PLM relationship. Do not conflate "Capella user" with "Teamcenter MBSE customer" — this distinction matters and was not always made cleanly by search-result summarization during this pass.

Attempted but Blocked: Nuclear Industry Case Study

Applied CAx published "Teamcenter Case Study – Nuclear Company – U.S." (https://www.appliedcax.com/teamcenter-case-study-nuclear-company-u-s/), which per its search snippet describes Teamcenter Requirements being introduced for early MBSE readiness in one of the most secure, ITAR-compliant Teamcenter environments the implementer had built. This page returned HTTP 403 Forbidden to WebFetch and could not be read directly in this pass — the summary above is reconstructed only from the search-result snippet, not verified page content. Treat this as unconfirmed; a future pass should try again or attempt an alternate access route (cached version, site search).

Confirmed Dead End: INCOSE-Gated Content

"The MBSE competence at the German Aerospace Center" (INCOSE resource page, https://www.incose.org/resource/the-mbse-competence-at-the-german-aerospace-center/) appeared relevant to A&D MBSE case studies but INCOSE resource pages of this type are typically member-gated; this pass did not access the full content and did not fabricate details beyond the title.

"Methodology-Driven MBSE: Arcadia, Capella and Systems Modeling Workbench" — an INCOSE Huntsville-chapter presentation PDF (author appears to be "Murphy" per the URL slug; likely presented at an INCOSE Huntsville chapter meeting) — returned HTTP 403 Forbidden when fetched directly: https://www.incose.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/methodology-driven-mbse-murphy-july-hsv-huntsville6680038572db67488e78ff000036190a.pdf This is the single most promising-looking source found in this entire pass for a genuinely independent (INCOSE-chapter-level, not vendor-blog) technical treatment of Arcadia/Capella/SMW together — but it could not be read, and its content is not summarized here to avoid fabrication. Worth a manual-browser retry in a future pass.

Overall Assessment

Similar to the pattern noted in the earlier Program Planning/IPP&E research pass, genuinely independent, named, technically-detailed A&D case studies specific to Teamcenter's MBSE/SysML capability (as opposed to Teamcenter PLM broadly, or Capella/ARCADIA independent of Teamcenter) are scarce in what's publicly indexed. What exists is: (1) vendor announcements picked up by trade press, (2) evidence that A&D heavyweights like Thales use the open-source engine Siemens partners with, without confirming they use Siemens' PLM wrapper around it, and (3) at least two promising documents (Applied CAx nuclear case study, INCOSE Huntsville PDF) blocked by HTTP 403 rather than confirmed absent. A future pass with browser-based access (rather than WebFetch) could plausibly recover both.