Stevens’ SERC at SSE Partners with New York Academy of Sciences to Release Infrastructure Architecture Framework
Using SystemiTool from SERC to facilitate collaboration, the framework was developed in coordination with professional and public sector organizations across industries.
The Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) of the School of Systems & Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology recently contributed to producing the New York Academy of Sciences’ Infrastructure Architecture Framework (IAF), a multi-sector approach to enterprise systems engineering and management.
“In order to effectively manage a city the size of New York, all infrastructure organizations need to work on common data so they can be equally informed,” explained Thomas A. McDermott Jr., Deputy Director of SERC at Stevens. “All infrastructure organizations, such as NY Power and NYC Transit, are defining data to drive what they do, but there’s a lack of standardization. The goal of IAF is to create and link common standards for data among organizations.”
Four domains of infrastructure guided the IAF: asset management, systems engineering, enterprise architecture, and information management. Each domain encomposses various industries and public infrastructure organizations with different standards of asset management. The IAF looked to provide an enterprise system model that connects all the relevant standards and practices.
SSE contributions included leadership within the expert committee from McDermott and Dr. Bill Rouse, a previous SSE faculty member and current member of the SERC Research Council. SERC at Stevens additionally provided SystemiTool, a software that uses web technologies to provide users an effective way to capture, manage and share knowledge.
Acting as academic advisors within the expert committee, McDermott and Dr. Rouse met biweekly to facilitate workshops with members from organizations such as the American Society of Civil Engineers, INCOSE and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Throughout the production of IAF, committee members used SystemiTool’s online, real-time collaboration functionality to showcase systemigrams modelling relationships between industry standards.
“This really is an example of Stevens supporting the local community,” said McDermott. “SERC at SSE provides the resources and tools to help New York City solve real-world management issues.”
Published in November 2021, the Infrastructure Architecture Framework v1.0 is available to read via the New York Academy of Sciences website.