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

Defining life cycles

This section introduces the main concepts associated with life cycles. These concepts will be described using the modeling techniques that have been introduced so far in this book, specifically by expanding the existing MBSE ontology to include the life cycle concepts. As the MBSE ontology expands, the scope of the overall ontology will increase to include more concepts, but, very importantly, it will be consistent with everything else described so far in the book.

One of the key concepts associated with any life cycle is that of the stage, and this will form the start point of the discussion in the next section, which describes the key concepts associated with life cycles.

Defining life cycle concepts

There are several main concepts and associated terminology that need to be understood in order to perform systems engineering successfully. These main concepts are shown in the following diagram, which shows the first version of the ontology definition...