This paper reports an industrial experiment made at Thales to use Model Driven Architecture (MDA) for system engineering. System engineering processes are currently mainly document-centric. The main experiment goal was to study the applicability of MDA at the system engineering level. The experiment consisted of setting up a model-driven simulation environment for a maritime surveillance system. The simu- lation is achieved thanks to 3 models conform to 3 metamodels. The implementation uses the Eclipse Modeling Framework and is written in the Java Programming language. This pilot project met the deadline, the budget and the threshold of desired functionalities. We report the main advances given by the MDA approach in the context of simulation for system engineering.