Book Image

Systems Engineering Demystified

By : Jon Holt
Book Image

Systems Engineering Demystified

By: Jon Holt

Overview of this book

Systems engineering helps us to understand, specify, and develop complex systems, and is applied across a wide set of disciplines. As systems and their associated problems become increasingly complex in this evermore connected world, the need for more rigorous, demonstrable, and repeatable techniques also increases. Written by Professor Jon Holt – an internationally recognized systems engineering expert – this book provides a blend of technical and business aspects you need to understand in order to develop successful systems. You'll start with systems engineering basics and understand the complexity, communication, and different stakeholders' views of the system. The book then covers essential aspects of model-based systems engineering, systems, life cycles, and processes, along with techniques to develop systems. Moving on, you'll explore system models and visualization techniques, focusing on the SysML, and discover how solutions can be defined by developing effective system design, verification, and validation techniques. The book concludes by taking you through key management processes and systems engineering best practices and guidelines. By the end of this systems engineering book, you'll be able to confidently apply modern model-based systems engineering techniques to your own systems and projects.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Systems Engineering
4
Section 2: Systems Engineering Concepts
8
Section 3: Systems Engineering Techniques
14
Section 4: Next steps

The spoken language – the Systems Modeling Language (SysML)

SysML is a general-purpose visual modeling language. SysML is itself based on another general-purpose visual modeling language, known as UML. UML is a language that has its roots firmly in the software engineering world and was created for very pragmatic reasons. Prior to 1997, when the first version of UML was released, there was a whole plethora of modeling notations and methodologies that were being used for software engineering. In fact, there were over 150 different recognized approaches available.

Bearing in mind that one of the aims of a modeling notation is to provide a basic mechanism for communication, there were simply way too many available, which made the choice of notation both bewildering and difficult. In the mid-1990s, therefore, the software industry collectively decided that there were too many languages and that there should be a single, standardized, common language that everybody could use...