Quantifying the Ability of the Digital Engineering Factory to Address the Digital Engineering Competency Framework

It has been argued that higher education environments around the world have a responsibility to reevaluate their role in the education of future engineers as the engineering discipline undergoes significant change. The Digital Engineering Factory (DEF) is being developed by the University of Arizona (UA) to support the latest developments in digital engineering. The DEF is a collaborative digital engineering environment at the heart of the engineering curriculum. It comprises a tool suite that spans multiple engineering disciplines, thus supporting multiple courses across the Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering (SIE), which houses the systems engineering, industrial engineering, engineering management, and software engineering (SFWE) programs. In this paper, we evaluate the degree to which the DEF has the potential to address the competencies outlined by the System Engineering Research Center (SERC) in their Digital Engineering Competency Framework (DECF). The DECF has been developed to provide the Department of Defense (DoD) with a set of well-defined competencies comprising the knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors (KSABs) that are required of the digital engineering workforce.