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

Summary

In this chapter, the concept of needs has been explored and modeling associated with the different concepts covered has been discussed.

Initially, the importance of the concept of needs and the different types of needs, such as requirements and capabilities, was discussed. This led to understanding how to analyze needs in two ways: by describing each need using text-based properties and descriptions, and by gaining a true understanding of the underlying need by exploring the contexts of each need.

Context was introduced as one of the single most important aspects of needs modeling and, in order to establish this understanding, how important it is to understand the stakeholders that have an interest in the system. Each of these stakeholders has the potential to interpret each need in a different way to all other stakeholders, which is known as a modeling use case.

Each use case, and therefore its related need descriptions, must be validated, and two ways of validation...