Skip navigation

Design, architects, and complex communication systems: painting the bigger picture

Modern communication systems are complex. To meet market demand, modern systems integrate a vast variety of technologies, support substantial numbers of users, and require very high levels of automation, compute power and storage. Yet this complexity is not only present at the system level it also exists among and within organizations, as today’s systems are designed collaboratively, taking the viewpoints of many stakeholders into consideration. Consequently, designing systems efficiently has become a significant factor in controlling cost.
Magazine
May 13, 2015
Design, architects, and complex communication systems: painting the bigger picture

Model-based engineering offers the right level of person-to-person information transfer needed to design large, modern, complex systems efficiently. Ericsson has used this approach to develop a design toolset that can be adapted to the wide range of evolving system demands.

The aim is to produce a complete, coherent, consistent and revisable system description that enables networks to evolve in a controlled manner, address new challenges, and absorb new technologies.

By applying model-based engineering to the toolset, architects can validate proposed models, analyze the potential impact of suggested changes, detect inconsistencies, and ease the implementation process. In other words, the toolset helps architects to create the best system, and to do it efficiently.

This Ericsson Review describes how we developed our toolset, and why we adopted open-source technology so that developments in model-based engineering can be included as they become available. How we designed our toolset to serve modern multi-stakeholder environments.

Design, architects, and complex communication systems: painting the bigger picture