2021 was a challenging year for all of us. Despite the COVID19 pandemic, we tried our best to maintain our momentum - this article overviews what our team has accomplished in 2021. We are grateful to our colleagues for their hard work and dedication throughout the entire year.

Our team is constantly expanding with additional new colleagues on the engineering and operation side to offer safer, faster, and more reliable solutions and products. This year, as part of that process, we opened subsidiaries in the United States and in Vienna, Austria.

In 2021, we placed a great emphasis on developing our flagship product, the IncQuery Suite. We added the four solutions of the suite: IncQuery Server, IncQuery Desktop, IncQuery Model Analyzer, and IncQuery Model Viewer to the brand-new product website. We also created the first explainer video to the tool that explains the challenges of current Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and introduces the benefits of adopting our product. We have just released IncQuery Suite 2021.5.0 version last week with new features and improvements.  

Besides product development, our experts participated in personalized solution projects in Automotive Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, and Industrial Automation. We continued the collaboration within long-lasting partnerships with companies as Thales, Vincotech, BSH, Dassault Systemes, and logi.cals. We have written detailed case studies about completed significant projects, describing the technological challenges and the solutions our systems engineers offered, and our team's work for the pioneering engineering research organization, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  

We are proud of our academic roots and stay involved in the research community. We are currently participating in four ongoing research projects of the European Union:  

• The EMBrACE (Environment for Model-Based Design and Verification of CPS Systems) project tackles the challenges of complex, safety-critical CPS (cyber-physical systems) via integrated toolchains, unifying the different phases of the engineering process.
• The Lowcomote project aims to train 15 Ph.D. students (Early-Stage Researchers), who will become the leaders of tomorrow's engineering of low-code platforms. As a project member, IncQuery Labs has welcomed Benedek Horváth to join our team as a Ph.D. student. In 2021, his research results were presented at MODELS 2021, and he also talked at the Hungarian Researchers' Night academic event series.

• Arrowhead Tools, one of the most significant digitalization projects of the EU, focuses on digitalization and automation solutions for the European industry via a novel, comprehensive modeling, and operation approach to Systems of Systems. Géza Kulcsár, a senior researcher at IncQuery Labs, talked about our joint achievements within the project at the IEEE/IFIP Integrated Management conference and took part in high-impact plenary workshops and decision-making processes throughout the year.
• Our application to the Support for Market-driven RDI Projects tender was also successful this year. We received funding from the National Research, Development, and Innovation Fund of Hungary to create a new member of our product family: IncQuery for Automotive (I4A). This solution will offer innovative quality assurance while still connecting to the standardized, established solutions in automotive engineering.

Unfortunately, because of COVID19 travel restrictions, many of the conferences we usually attend were canceled or moved to online-only channels. However, our colleagues still participated in several industry-specific forums. Our CEO, István Ráth, joined by Enrique Krajmalnik from Zuken, presented at the 2021 INCOSE Western States Regional Conference. Their presentation promoted a paradigm shift in digital systems engineering and introduced innovative solutions to the challenges of diverse engineering scenarios. We also participated in the MODELS 2021 conference with multiple talks and even organized an event about graphs and natural language applications with the help of Manning Publications. At the end of the year, we had our first podcast appearance; István and Enrique were interviewed in the MBSE podcast and talked about current challenges of digital engineering.  

We had many other achievements that we are proud of in 2021. Our company has won the 'Responsible Employer of the Year' award by the Hungarian OFA Nonprofit Ltd. in the small business category. At the end of the year, István and our COO/CTO, Ákos Horváth, were given the honorary associate professor title by the Budapest University of Technology and Economics Faculty of Engineering and Informatics.  

In 2022, we are looking forward to making engineering even better, more efficient, and safer.