Systems Engineering Practice

A Systems Engineering Practice is an engineering discipline that studies systems engineering tasks (which focus on how to design complex systems).

• Context:
  • It can (often) support the systematic and disciplined approach for designing, creating, and managing complex systems over their life cycles.
  • It can (often) be employed in designing and managing systems that can range from electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, civil engineering, software engineering, and other related disciplines.
  • It can aim at ensuring that all likely aspects of a system are considered, and integrated into a whole.
  • It can (often) involve problem-solving techniques, requirement management, risk management, system architecture design, system modeling and simulation, and verification and validation.
  • It can involve interdisciplinary approaches that combine engineering and management.
  • It can incorporate considerations of customer needs, functional requirements, system constraints, optimization, reliability, and lifecycle cost.
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• Example(s):
  • Automotive Engineering Practice: Implementing a model-based systems engineering approach to integrate different subsystems such as sensors, control systems, and communication systems in an autonomous car to ensure safe and efficient operation.
  • Civil Engineering Practice: Developing a new airport terminal using systems engineering principles to ensure optimal flow of passengers, luggage, and aircraft, through effective layout design, resource allocation, and logistics planning.
  • Aerospace Engineering Practice: Employing systems engineering in the design and development of a satellite, focusing on integration of propulsion, communication, and navigation subsystems to ensure it meets mission requirements within cost and schedule constraints.
  • Software Engineering Practice: Utilizing systems engineering principles in developing a large-scale web application by coordinating front-end and back-end development teams, managing system requirements, ensuring data integrity and security, and optimizing performance and scalability to provide a seamless user experience.
    • System Reliability Engineering Practice: Applying systems engineering principles to the design of a power grid, ensuring its reliability and robustness by analyzing potential failure modes and implementing backup systems and redundancies.
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Using trial and error methods without considering system integration.
  • A software development process that doesn’t consider the overall system design and only focuses on code creation.
  • ...
• See: System Lifecycle, System Integration, System Reliability Engineering Practice, Engineering Management, Systems Thinking, Safety-Critical System, Enterprise Life Cycle.

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References

2021

• (Wikipedia, 2021) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering#Related_fields_and_sub-fields Retrieved:2021-9-10.
  • Many related fields may be considered tightly coupled to systems engineering. The following areas have contributed to the development of systems engineering as a distinct entity:

    ;Cognitive systems engineering

    :Cognitive systems engineering (CSE) is a specific approach to the description and analysis of human-machine systems or sociotechnical systems. The three main themes of CSE are how humans cope with complexity, how work is accomplished by the use of artifacts, and how human-machine systems and socio-technical systems can be described as joint cognitive systems. CSE has since its beginning become a recognized scientific discipline, sometimes also referred to as cognitive engineering. The concept of a Joint Cognitive System (JCS) has in particular become widely used as a way of understanding how complex socio-technical systems can be described with varying degrees of resolution. The more than 20 years of experience with CSE has been described extensively. ;Configuration management :Like systems engineering, configuration management as practiced in the defense and aerospace industry is a broad systems-level practice. The field parallels the taskings of systems engineering; where systems engineering deals with requirements development, allocation to development items and verification, configuration management deals with requirements capture, traceability to the development item, and audit of development item to ensure that it has achieved the desired functionality that systems engineering and/or Test and Verification Engineering have proven out through objective testing. ;Control engineering :Control engineering and its design and implementation of control systems, used extensively in nearly every industry, is a large sub-field of systems engineering. The cruise control on an automobile and the guidance system for a ballistic missile are two examples. Control systems theory is an active field of applied mathematics involving the investigation of solution spaces and the development of new methods for the analysis of the control process.

    ;Industrial engineering

    Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering that concerns the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, material and process. Industrial engineering draws upon the principles and methods of engineering analysis and synthesis, as well as mathematical, physical and social sciences together with the principles and methods of engineering analysis and design to specify, predict, and evaluate results obtained from such systems.

    ;Interface design

     :Interface design and its specification are concerned with assuring that the pieces of a system connect and inter-operate with other parts of the system and with external systems as necessary. Interface design also includes assuring that system interfaces be able to accept new features, including mechanical, electrical and logical interfaces, including reserved wires, plug-space, command codes and bits in communication protocols. This is known as extensibility. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) or Human-Machine Interface (HMI) is another aspect of interface design, and is a critical aspect of modern systems engineering. Systems engineering principles are applied in the design of communication protocols for local-area networks and wide-area networks.

    ;Mechatronic engineering

     :Mechatronic engineering, like systems engineering, is a multidisciplinary field of engineering that uses dynamical systems modeling to express tangible constructs. In that regard it is almost indistinguishable from Systems Engineering, but what sets it apart is the focus on smaller details rather than larger generalizations and relationships. As such, both fields are distinguished by the scope of their projects rather than the methodology of their practice.

    ;Operations research

     :Operations research supports systems engineering. The tools of operations research are used in systems analysis, decision making, and trade studies. Several schools teach SE courses within the operations research or industrial engineering department,highlighting the role systems engineering plays in complex projects. Operations research, briefly, is concerned with the optimization of a process under multiple constraints.

    ;Performance engineering

     :Performance engineering is the discipline of ensuring a system meets customer expectations for performance throughout its life. Performance is usually defined as the speed with which a certain operation is executed, or the capability of executing a number of such operations in a unit of time. Performance may be degraded when operations queued to execute is throttled by limited system capacity. For example, the performance of a packet-switched network is characterized by the end-to-end packet transit delay, or the number of packets switched in an hour. The design of high-performance systems uses analytical or simulation modeling, whereas the delivery of high-performance implementation involves thorough performance testing. Performance engineering relies heavily on statistics, queueing theory and probability theory for its tools and processes.

    ;Program management and project management

     :Program management (or programme management) has many similarities with systems engineering, but has broader-based origins than the engineering ones of systems engineering. Project management is also closely related to both program management and systems engineering.

    ;Proposal engineering

    :Proposal engineering is the application of scientific and mathematical principles to design, construct, and operate a cost-effective proposal development system. Basically, proposal engineering uses the “systems engineering process” to create a cost-effective proposal and increase the odds of a successful proposal.

    ;Reliability engineering

     :Reliability engineering is the discipline of ensuring a system meets customer expectations for reliability throughout its life; i.e., it does not fail more frequently than expected. Next to prediction of failure, it is just as much about prevention of failure. Reliability engineering applies to all aspects of the system. It is closely associated with maintainability, availability (dependability or RAMS preferred by some), and logistics engineering. Reliability engineering is always a critical component of safety engineering, as in failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and hazard fault tree analysis, and of security engineering.

    ;Risk Management

     :Risk management, the practice of assessing and dealing with risk is one of the interdisciplinary parts of Systems Engineering. In development, acquisition, or operational activities, the inclusion of risk in tradeoff with cost, schedule, and performance features, involves the iterative complex configuration management of traceability and evaluation to the scheduling and requirements management across domains and for the system lifecycle that requires the interdisciplinary technical approach of systems engineering. Systems Engineering has Risk Management define, tailor, implement, and monitor a structured process for risk management which is integrated to the overall effort.

    ;Safety engineering

    :The techniques of safety engineering may be applied by non-specialist engineers in designing complex systems to minimize the probability of safety-critical failures. The "System Safety Engineering" function helps to identify "safety hazards" in emerging designs, and may assist with techniques to "mitigate" the effects of (potentially) hazardous conditions that cannot be designed out of systems.

    ;Scheduling

     : Scheduling is one of the systems engineering support tools as a practice and item in assessing interdisciplinary concerns under configuration management. In particular the direct relationship of resources, performance features, and risk to duration of a task or the dependency links among tasks and impacts across the system lifecycle are systems engineering concerns.

    ;Security engineering

     : Security engineering can be viewed as an interdisciplinary field that integrates the community of practice for control systems design, reliability, safety and systems engineering. It may involve such sub-specialties as authentication of system users, system targets and others: people, objects and processes.

    ;Software engineering

    :From its beginnings, software engineering has helped shape modern systems engineering practice. The techniques used in the handling of the complexities of large software-intensive systems have had a major effect on the shaping and reshaping of the tools, methods and processes of Systems Engineering.

2020

• (INCOSE, 2020) ⇒ https://www.incose.org/systems-engineering Retrieved:2023-06-15.
  • QUOTE: Systems engineers are at the heart of creating successful new systems. They are responsible for the system concept, architecture, and design. They analyze and manage complexity and risk. They decide how to measure whether the deployed system actually works as intended. They are responsible for a myriad of other facets of system creation. Systems engineering is the discipline that makes their success possible – their tools, techniques, methods, knowledge, standards, principles, and concepts. The launch of successful systems can invariably be traced to innovative and effective systems engineering.
  • Systems Engineering is a transdisciplinary and integrative approach to enable the successful realization, use, and retirement of engineered systems, using systems principles and concepts, and scientific, technological, and management methods.

    We use the terms “engineering” and “engineered” in their widest sense: “the action of working artfully to bring something about”. “Engineered systems” may be composed of any or all of people, products, services, information, processes, and natural elements.

2019

• (Wikipedia, 2019) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/systems_engineering Retrieved:2019-12-11.
  • Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design and manage complex systems over their life cycles. At its core, systems engineering utilizes systems thinking principles to organize this body of knowledge. The individual outcome of such efforts, an engineered system, can be defined as a combination of components that work in synergy to collectively perform a useful function.

    Issues such as requirements engineering, reliability, logistics, coordination of different teams, testing and evaluation, maintainability and many other disciplines necessary for successful system design, development, implementation, and ultimate decommission become more difficult when dealing with large or complex projects. Systems engineering deals with work-processes, optimization methods, and risk management tools in such projects. It overlaps technical and human-centered disciplines such as industrial engineering, process systems engineering, mechanical engineering, manufacturing engineering, control engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, cybernetics, organizational studies, civil engineering and project management. Systems engineering ensures that all likely aspects of a project or system are considered, and integrated into a whole.

    The systems engineering process is a discovery process that is quite unlike a manufacturing process. A manufacturing process is focused on repetitive activities that achieve high quality outputs with minimum cost and time. The systems engineering process must begin by discovering the real problems that need to be resolved, and identifying the most probable or highest impact failures that can occur – systems engineering involves finding solutions to these problems.

2018

• (NASA, 2018) ⇒ https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_systems_engineering_handbook.pdf Retrieved:2023-06-15.
  • QUOTE: Systems engineering is the art and science of developing an operable system capable of meeting requirements within often opposed constraints. Systems engineering is a holistic, integrative discipline, wherein the contributions of structural engineers, electrical engineers, mechanism designers, power engineers, human factors engineers, and many more disciplines are evaluated and balanced, one against another, to produce a coherent whole that is not dominated by the perspective of a single discipline.2

1990

• (Blanchard et al., 1990) ⇒ Benjamin S. Blanchard, Wolter J. Fabrycky, and Walter J. Fabrycky. (1990). “Systems Engineering and Analysis. Vol. 4.” Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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