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

Visualizing needs using different SysML diagrams

The previous section defined the concepts associated with needs in the form of the needs ontology. This section looks at each of these in more detail and shows how needs may be realized using a number of different views, each of which will be visualized using the SysML notation.

Visualizing source elements

This section discusses the importance of defining source elements and introduces the source element view, which is used to visualize these source elements. There are five basic reasons why we need to identify these source elements, which are as follows:

  • To identify the origin of all the needs that are defined for a system: This is something that is often overlooked or neglected altogether, but this is important for a number of reasons.
  • To demonstrate the provenance of all needs: It is essential to be able to identify where each need originated. This must include an actual reference to the origin so that the source...