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

Describing interfaces

Whenever such interactions have been defined, then there is also the potential to identify interfaces between these model elements. Controlling interfaces is a crucial part of systems engineering as it allows the control of interactions between different model elements. MBSE allows interfaces to be identified, defined, and managed using an established set of modeling views. This section will describe a set of views that allow any interface to be modeled.

Identifying interfaces

For the sake of this discussion, the relationship between the three lowest levels of the system hierarchy will be focused on, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 3.7 – Identifying generic interfaces between system elements

The diagram in Figure 3.7 shows the concept of interfaces that exist between system elements, using a SysML block definition diagram. From a modeling point of view, note how a generalization relationship has been introduced to...