What Is Systems Engineering?Many of us already practice systems engineering, but call it something else: design or development of product, process, and service. Systems Engineering enables practicing engineers to integrate their specialties in the development of complex products and processes. It focuses on customers' needs throughout the product life cycle of design, testing, manufacturing, operation, and future product planning. Systems Engineering enhances time, cost, and performance by enabling the engineer to function in an interdisciplinary team and by providing quantitative methods for business and technical decision making. Systems Engineering focuses is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of sucessful systems. It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem: Operations --Performance -- Test-- Manufacturing -- Cost & Schedule--Training & Support--Disposal. Systems Engineering integrates all the disciplines and specialty groups into a team effort forming a structured development process that proceeds from concept to production to operation. Systems Engineering considers both the business and technical needs of all stakeholders with the goal of providing a quality product that meet the users needs. The Power Point presentation given by Dr. Brian Mar, one of the founders of INCOSE and a Systems Engineering Fellow: A logical sequence of activities and decisions transforming an operational need into a description of system performance parameters and a preferred system configuration. A comprehensive, iterative problem solving process that is used to:
An interdisciplinary collaborative approach to derive, evolve, and verify a life-cycle balanced system solution which satisfies customer expectations and meets public acceptability. The Systems Engineering Process provides a focused approach for product development which attempts to balance all factors associated with product life-cycle viability and competitiveness in a global marketplace. This process provides a structured approach for considering alternative design and configurations. The systems engineering process is applied recursively one level of development at a time. Initially, it is applied to identify the best concept, or approach, to satisfy the market opportunity. This could be a concept for a totally new product / system of a concept for making an incremental improvement to an already established product. The second application of the process adds value to the concept by fully describing the products / system definition and establishing a configuration baseline. This application provides the basis for accomplishing the more detailed engineering development of subsystems, components, and elements of a total system; or the appropriated parts of an established product undergoing incremental improvement during the next application. For an in-depth discussion of systems engineering, check out What Is Systems Engineering? A Consensus of Senior Systems Engineers by Terry Bahill, a professor of Systems and Industrial Engineering at University of Arizona and Systems Engineering Fellow. Dorothy Mc Kinney is chief software architect for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, a Systems Engineering Fellow, and lead instructor for PSU's Requirements Engineering course, SYSE 573. She recommends the following INCOSE web resources for students taking her systems engineering class: |
