2.1

Engineers are the owners of an industrial process, product delivery oriented

Dictionary states that “Engineers are persons who design and built things to solve specific problems and bring solutions”. Engineers are so recognized as the owners of a specific industrial process allowing the design, production and delivery of concrete products [figure 1 left]. This industrial process is based on three pillars which are to be fulfilled for a successful product delivery: these are the On-Time, On-Cost and On-Quality delivery [figure 1 right].

Figure 1:

left: main steps of an industrial process which shall be owned by the engineers. Right: the 3 pillars of a successful product delivery.

This industrial engineering process, to be successfully mastered, implies students learn fundamental physics, obviously, but also develop their know-how, entrepreneurship and behavior, because:

Lets’ elaborate a bit what know-how, entrepreneurship and behavior means.

2.2

Know-how, entrepreneurship and behavior: the three main skills to master the engineering process

Know-how: the engineers shall be capable to start their work from a set of requirements coming from a customer not having a high technical background, as it is the case in B-to-C (Business to Customer). These requirements are sometimes not that consistent or clear. More, some requirements can be in contradiction. From this set, engineers shall draw the best design or more generally speaking the best technical solution in consideration of the schedule and cost imposed.

This implies a long flow of activities such as requirements analysis, clarifications, design trade-off, risk mitigation decisions, analyses, internal discussions, external discussions with customer or with suppliers, iterations, product policy reconciliation, reviews, tests, work, rework, recovery… to be put in a right order and a right way in order to, at the end, converge and succeed to produce and deliver the product in compliance to customer expectation.

The two examples of System Development Life Cycle [figure 2] illustrate this process: at each step, technical knowledge is present to serve the successful achievement of the step. Such achievement is the necessary condition to go to the next step up to a successful product delivery. Capability of the engineers to master and run this process is know-how.

Figure 2:

System development cycle (Round or V-shape) defining the process to run for a successful product development. Engineering is a process. Capability of the engineers to master and run this process is know-how.

It is always amazing to see in the courses students capable to execute with a high level of mastering complex calculations from a well given problematic expressed in a technical language, where they become very embarrassed when the same problematic is expressed in an end-to-end mission objective in a “customer” language, and lead to implement a system design process starting first with the need to translate the requirements into a technical language and flow-down them from system to equipment. This know-how is a major differentiator for the innovative industries.

The two other skills which are entrepreneurship and behavior can be categorized as soft skills in comparison to hard skill which is the set of all technical knowledge acquired by the students through the physic courses.

Entrepreneurship is a spirit allowing to capture, develop or use innovation [figure 3]: curiosity and willingness to innovate are obviously the trigger. But in a complex world where nothing is “pre-revealed” the entrepreneur shall start from a confused and huge set of various, unclear, partial and unstable information, from which he shall be capable to:

Figure 3:

Illustration of the entrepreneurship spirit: this mindset is a quality expected from innovative industries

Such capability is neither obvious nor a common quality shared by all human being. But at the end this is a quality expected from innovative industries.

Behavior: photonic industry is mainly organized per projects in which optical specialists have to interact with other people from technical as well as from non-technical domains. How to create value from the accumulation of single competences and ideas? This is the famous 1+1=3 contradicting the rules of mathematics we used to say to illustrate how people working as a team can be an extremely powerful way of generating ideas and solutions [figure 4]: like a football team, engineers shall be capable to act, interact and be engaged in a community, at the service of a common objective which is the product delivery.

Figure 4:

Illustration of the behavior: this mindset is a quality expected from the engineers.

2.3

A common language and metric is needed for industry to capture and use innovation

Industry needs for growth engineers capable to capture innovation. Making innovation concrete requires the convergence of several actors from various horizons, which shall work together in a fully interleaved manner. Figure 5 illustrates this: academia and government labs are the first step for innovation with basic or applied research. Then they interact with entrepreneurs for technical development, later followed by prototypes and systems developments often taken over by larger companies. Engineers shall be capable to master these interactions. Students should so acquire this capability.

Figure 5:

Illustration of the interactions between research and industry from an idea up to its use. Engineers shall be capable to master these interactions. Students should acquire this capability during their studies.

To interact implies to be capable to communicate and understand each other. A common language and metric appears so to be necessary in order to answer to the below questions:

Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) is a systematic metric/measurement system that supports assessment of the maturity of a particular technology and the consistent comparison of maturity between different types of technology. We will not develop this further as we already presented it in a former SPIE OSD conference. Lets’ however remind the scale which should be a common language for whole community. Figure 6 is extracted from NASA standards.

Figure 6:

Technology Readiness Levels is a common language for mastering the capture and use of innovations.

For successful implementation of innovation, it is essential to map the path from concept to product implementation. TRL is a key element in planning the path across Death Valley transition positioning funding lines correctly with targets and objectives for the next step [figure 7]:

Figure 7:

Example of TRL application: product Life cycle for a satellite using TRL scale as a metric.

As consequence of all what has been developed above, such interleaved and multi-actors collaboration needs an ecosystem where students, researchers, teachers and industries meet and foster the acquisition of these skills by the students [Figure 8].

Figure 8:

A visual description of the ecosystem to be developed for allowing students to master the engineering industrial process. ASERFO, French association of optics industries worked at promoting this ecosystem.

3.1

Presentation of ASERFO

ASERFO, French association of optics industries (Thales, Airbus, CEA, Essilor…) [figure 9], worked at promoting an ecosystem where students, researchers, teachers and industries meet and foster the acquisition by the students of these skills described above, by funding, advising and supporting the training at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School, as an industrial advisory committee. Three main streams to be highlighted are:

Figure 9:

majors companies in the domain of the optical sensors were member of ASERFO… working as an industrial advisory committee toward Institut d’Optique Graduate School (IOGS)

Founded in 1917, Institut d’Optique Graduate School is a European leader for higher education in Photonics. As a French "Ecole d’ingénieur", IOGS has an intake of over 150 students per year. IOGS offers the broadest scope in the field of photonics and optical sciences and engineering in Europe. Its international reputation is built on: high quality academic and practical education, major scientific contributions of its research center and close ties with industry.

3.2

Presentation of the four assets implemented by Institut d’Optique Graduate School (IOGS)

3.2.1

Asset 1: Industry tools, language and methods are teach through specific “project management” courses

Let’s illustrate briefly some tools and methods teach, always referring to the three pillars presented above which are the On-Time, On-Cost, and On Quality delivery [figure 10]:

Figure 10:

some illustration of commonly and largely tools used for On-Time, On-Cost, On-quality delivery

• • V-shape development cycle

• • Specification flow-down and reconciliation

• • System design road-map

• • Activity logic and schedule optimization

• • Cost management and mastering

• • Risk management and mitigation

• • Schedule analysis and critical path optimization

• • Value Stream Mapping

• • Design-to-cost, Design-to-manufacture

• • KPIs…

Everybody can recognize there as being commonly and largely used by industry. Students must master these.

3.2.2

Asset 2: experimental resources, the way to develop practical skills in photonics

Institut d’Optique Graduate School has placed strong emphasis on hands-on training, which is inseparable from top-level classroom training. Some clear features to illustrate this concretely:

• ✓ Lab-work is a high portion of the time spent by the students: 100 to 200 hours per year,

• ✓ Over 150 experiments are proposed to students,

• ✓ Lab-work teaching involves 70 researchers, engineers, assistant professors and professors to guide the students 150 which is a huge ratio,

Experiments are maintained up-to-date to reflect the most recent advances in all areas of photonics.

Institut d’Optique Graduate School provides its students with opportunities to perform top-level labwork in quantum physics (source of entangled photons, saturated absorption), instrumental optics (adaptive optics, phase-shifting interferometer, etc.), lasers (holography, interferometry, optical parametric oscillators, etc.) and optical telecommunications (erbium-doped fibre amplifiers, 10 Gb/s digital transmission). Examples are given in the followings [figure 11]:

Figure 11:

examples of experiments made at IOGS

• • Laser: experiments on a vast number of laser types, from HeNe lasers, laser diodes, and diode-pumped solid-state lasers, to pulsed lasers, fiber lasers, and optical parametric oscillators.

• • Instrumental optics: from the simplest experiments in first year on optical instruments (microscopes, afocal lens, etc.) to the study of aberrations, wavefront analysis, photometry, the measurement of the modulation transfer functions in optical systems and adaptive optics.

• • Wave optics: experiments involving diffraction, spatial filtering, holography, and interferometers followed by more complex labwork on the interference of polarised light and ellipsometry. Properties of speckle, speckle interferometry, photorefractive crystals and real-time holography are also studied.

• • Fiber optics and optical communication: this heading encompasses experiments on fiber optic characterisation (dispersion measurement and optical time-domain reflectometry) as well as experiments involving fibers (fiber optic gyroscopes, laser and fiber amplifiers, fiber-optic communication, Raman scattering in a fiber).

• • Measurement systems: optical and electronic sensors. This heading encompasses experiments with a strong focus on electronics and signal processing. The workings of devices such as sensors, optical and infrared detectors, infrared cameras and laser rangefinders are discussed.

• • Quantum physics, atomic physics, nanophysics: experiments in saturated absorption and generating plasmons. Creation of a source of entangled photons (violation of Bell’s theorem).

ASERFO has played a key role in this topic, advising IOGS for the best choices of new technologies in photonics, and co-funding the lab-work facilities.

3.2.3

Asset 3: students’ projects, a first real contact to industry

Student at IOGS (first and second year of master degree) have to realize projects in close relation with the industry:

• ✓ First action deals with understanding of the problematic,

• ✓ Then working on specifications, the realization of the technical part is the main point of the project.

• ✓ Last, the project ends with a presentation in front of teachers and engineers from the company involved in the project.

Projects can be related to many fields in photonics: head-up displays, spectral analysis of beauty creams, analysis of bidirectional reflectance distribution function for textiles, characterization of visual flux induced by street lamps, velocimetry by doppler effects using single frequency lasers...are some but not exhaustive concrete examples of achievements [figure 12].

Figure 12:

examples of projects made at IOGS (public illustrations)

A project is carried out by a group of students (2-4) with a supervisor of IOGS generally involved in the topics through his own topic of research. The time dedicated to the project represents 50 hours in master 1 and 100 hours in master 2.

3.3

Co-location is essential for developing a powerful ecosystem

In the same building (10,000 m2), IOGS has gathered 30 starts up in photonics, funding structures, fablab and creative rooms, and teaching rooms able to welcome the 100 students of the entrepreneurship program [figure 15]. IOGS has an agreement with each company housed in the building: each of them agree to coach the students and advise them in key periods (test of prototypes, research of customers, research of funding...). For the projects, the help of companies acts as a real accelerator for the projects.

Figure 15:

The IOGS main building where is implemented the ecosystem

3.4

This ecosystem also fosters the adaptation of the education with industry evolutions

Engineering industrial processes are evolving fast: innovation lies now in design to manufacturing and design-to-cost drivers. This implies agile development instead of classical V-cycle approach, concurrent engineering and production approach [figure 16]. As example, the satellites’ domain is currently leaving a revolution with several initiatives which OneWeb constellation in which Airbus Defence & Space is highly involved, is an illustration: even if they have demonstrated their efficiency for launching high technology and reliable satellites, classical cycles are, for this type of application, too much time and cost consuming. Such new cycles or approaches are put in place leading today to a drastic cost and schedule reduction: “no one has ever built a satellite in one day…we will build several every day!” OneWeb said.

Figure 16:

Illustration of the current evolution of the engineering processes

This proximity with industry allows the students to be trained on these up-to date processes.