Book Image

Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook

By : Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass
Book Image

Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook

By: Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass

Overview of this book

Agile MBSE can help organizations manage constant change and uncertainty while continuously ensuring system correctness and meeting customers’ needs. But deploying it isn’t easy. Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook is a little different from other MBSE books out there. This book focuses on workflows – or recipes, as the author calls them – that will help MBSE practitioners and team leaders address practical situations that are part of deploying MBSE as part of an agile development process across the enterprise. Written by Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass, a world-renowned expert in MBSE, this book will take you through important systems engineering workflows and show you how they can be performed effectively with an agile and model-based approach. You’ll start with the key concepts of agile methods for systems engineering, but we won’t linger on the theory for too long. Each of the recipes will take you through initiating a project, defining stakeholder needs, defining and analyzing system requirements, designing system architecture, performing model-based engineering trade studies, all the way to handling systems specifications off to downstream engineering. By the end of this MBSE book, you’ll have learned how to implement critical systems engineering workflows and create verifiably correct systems engineering models.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Chapter 3: Developing System Architectures

System analysis pays attention to the required properties of a system, such as its functionality, while system design focuses on how to implement a system that implements those needs effectively. There are many different designs that can realize the same functionality, and system engineers must select a design based on how well it optimizes crucial system properties. This degree of optimization is determined by examining the measures of effectiveness (MoEs) that have been applied to the design. Design is all about optimization, and architecture is no different. Architecture is where high-level design concerns that organize and orchestrate the overall structure and behavior of the system are integrated.

Design exists at (at least) three levels of abstraction. The highest level – the focus of this chapter – is architectural design. Architectural design helps us make choices that optimize the system's overall properties...