Defining Roles, Enabling Systems: A Structured Role Model for Engineering Advanced Systems

Successful systems development depends not only on technical excellence but also on clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and communication paths within interdisciplinary teams. In the context of increasing system complexity, expanding stakeholder networks, and growing demands for efficiency and resilience, the understanding of roles in Advanced Systems Engineering (ASE) is becoming a critical area of both research and practice. As part of an interactive workshop hosted by the German Chapter of INCOSE (GfSE) in February 2025, a theoretically grounded reference model comprising 27 role profiles was validated and refined through a participatory process. The workshop focused not only on evaluating role descriptions in terms of tasks, competencies, and interfaces but also on systematically capturing communication paths, linguistic models, and tool landscapes across roles. This paper presents the applied methodology and key results of the validation process. Furthermore, it introduces an integrated collaboration model that maps inter-role relationships and identifies potential sources of communication inconsistencies. The findings contribute to the theory-driven structuring of collaborative interactions in SE processes and offer new perspectives for applying role models across organizations of varying sizes and maturities.