The INCOSE International Symposium (IS) 2026, held in Yokohama, Japan, during June 13-18, brought together around 800 in-person attendees, plus a strong online audience, from the global systems engineering community. Attendance jumped by about 30% compared to last year, despite the far-flung location. This year’s agenda is packed with roughly 160 sessions, including tutorials, paper presentations, and vendor tracks.
This year’s theme, "Beyond Digital Engineering: Seeking Wa in SE”, set the tone for the whole symposium: harmonizing emerging technologies like AI with the irreplaceable power of human creativity and Kansei (sensibility), all guided by Wa, the Japanese concept of harmony.
The opening Keynote by Dr. Yuko Harayama, Secretary General of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) Tokyo Expert Support Center, put that theme into words. Her talk "What Does Human Touch Mean in the Age of AI? A Society 5.0 Perspective" argued that sociotechnical factors can't just be an afterthought as AI works its way deeper into the workplace
The second day’s keynote pushed the argument further. Professor Giancarlo Guizzardi, in “Thinking Fast and Slow in Systems Engineering,” argued for integrating “data-only” reasoning systems such as LLMs with concept-based systems like Ontologies. His point reflected a broader tension in the field, making the case that data-only inference systems can never be moral.
Beyond the keynotes, AI dominated the agenda. Talks on applying LLMs to systems engineering and training systems engineers came from practitioners across A&D, automotive, and other industries, alongside a steady stream of academic research.
One trend stood out: pairing AI with ontologies to sharpen output and reduce the level of hallucinations. A couple of industrial talks, both from China, focused on that. And the number of sessions says it all: 4 talks about AI for requirements, and 7 talks about AI for MBSE.
Digital engineering was also one of the main focus areas, with about 8 talks. And finally, MBSE remained, as always, a pillar of INCOSE, with approximately 18 presentations.
In this talk, "Navigating the digital engineering landscape: key foundations," I laid out the core building blocks of a Digital Engineering Environment (DEE):
From there, the talk moved to concrete DEE implementations. IBM’s ELM and its OSLC-based architecture came up as one example, alongside an overview of how SodiusWillert SECollab puts these building blocks into practice, and the range of Digital Engineering use cases it supports.
Around 40 commercial vendors took part this year, roughly 50% more than last year’s event. Here is a brief overview of a few of them.
Dassault Systèmes was among the platinum sponsors, with a substantial booth presence and numerous sessions. Their “virtual twin” concept ran across their modelling and simulation tools. At INCOSE, Cameo and SysML v2 took center stage, with a first-ever demonstration of SysML v2 simulation.
IBM highlighted both the “ELM AI hub” concept and Rhapsody SE with SysML v2.
Ansys, now part of Synopsys, focused their INCOSE presence on SAM and SysML v2, while also presenting their broader combined vision: to enable a digital thread running from system architecture all the way to silicon.
Obeo featured Capella and SysOn, both built on SysML v2.
Sensmetry featured their SysIDE, built around the “System as Code" paradigm, a textual implementation of SysML V2, but now paired with graphical visualization through automatically rendered graphical views. A free VS Code plugin handles SysML V2 text editing, while a premium solution adds visualization and other capabilities.
MathWorks centered its presence on System Composer, its SysML-like architectural solution integrated with Matlab/Simulink. A SysML v2 connector to interoperate with System Composer is also in the works, but it’s still a roadmap item for now
Sparx Systems Japan highlighted their MBSE CI/CD integration built on their LemonTree diff/merge tool and gave an early look at “Trechoro”, their upcoming SysML v2 implementation.
PTC emphasized its vision for end-to-end integrated engineering. CodeBeamer and PureVariants, their latest acquisitions, took center stage again with CodeBeamer now folding in AI-powered assistants for requirements assessments, test generation, and regulatory assistance.
Siemens showcased their MBSE integration across their digital toolchain, anchored by IBM Rhapsody SE, alongside Polarion as their ALM platform within the Excelerator framework. This year’s addition: AI-assisted capabilities, including an MCP server for Polarion.
Dassault kept its INCOSE focus on Cameo, with one talk demonstrating a digital thread from Cameo to mechanical design.
Tracespace - They positioned themselves as an “AI Native” requirements platform, empowered by a graph database that enables AI agents to reason about requirements quality, consistency, and traceability.
Jama Software - Jama featured their Jama Connect platform, adding AI to the conversation this year through a newly introduced MCP server for the platform.
"The Yokohama event clearly demonstrated that AI is not passing trend at INCOSE, quite the contrary. AI was actually the backdrop against which all other discussions now take place. And the real message this year was the willingness to anchor this momentum in harmony (or WA, to resume this secular concept), ontologies, human judgement, and sociotechnical awareness. It was a symposium I thoroughly enjoyed."