Standards and standardization - Relevance and challenges

The aim of this article is to show, step-by-step, how to develop and implement the relevant standards to ensure that a system operates correctly and seamlessly throughout its life cycle, and gives full satisfaction to all stakeholders, from users to maintainers, from managers to supervisors.

The article begins by defining and differentiating between the key concepts of norms, standards and regulations. It characterizes the main types of standards.

The article goes on to show the relevance of standards, both from an economic point of view and in terms of the potentially long life of systems. In this respect, it presents the impact of standards in the telecommunications field on the development of the mobile telephony market, which has gone from a niche market in the 1980s to a mass market today.

Next, the article presents three ways of driving standards production: by technologies, by capabilities, and by both capabilities and technologies. The latter is more detailed, showing that research and technology (R&T) processes and activities must be synchronized with overall system project management, in particular to prepare for upgrades, renovations and evolutions throughout the lifecycle. This approach is based on technology maturity levels: in fact, R&T activities must be carried out so as to be able to replace obsolete technologies with mature ones during the renovations that punctuate the life of a system. Removing obsolete technologies and integrating mature ones affects both the functional and organic architecture of the system. Impacts must be assessed and anticipated as far upstream as possible, so that the system can be sized accordingly. Anticipation enables us to define the necessary reserves to take account of contingencies. While new technologies must, at the very least, be isofunctional in relation to the original technologies, they often offer new possibilities not initially envisaged, which enrich the system's capabilities, but which can also generate new risks.

The article presents the activities involved in selecting the right domain standards for a system, assessing their usefulness and relevance, and maintaining the standards repository throughout the life of the system.

The article continues with an overview of standardization organizations in the field of systems engineering, at international, European and national level, and a summary presentation of a few standards in the field of systems engineering, including the open systems standard, which is relevant to the issues discussed in this article.