Fundamentals of Systems Engineering—A Practitioner’s Approach

Abstract

In today’s globalized environment, companies compete fiercely for business. They need world class product quality, no cost overrun and schedule slippage. Customer satisfaction is number 1 and cannot afford system development failures. Practicing systems engineering is the answer. It is an old subject but has been revitalized since the mid 90s. Systems engineering is now a major theme in this century has led to reduction in time-to-market, improving quality and reducing costs. However, systems engineering has not been sufficiently understood by the majority of workers (technical and nontechnical, professional and non-professional, and financial, etc.), evidenced by many failures been reported, specifically in US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports. Therefore, continuous systems engineering education is still needed, which is the major theme of this chapter. In this chapter a history of systems engineering is introduced; including why it is needed, its evolution and revitalization. the fundamentals are presented. The requirement management process needs to be followed to analyze, derive, allocate and trace the requirements. Functional analysis can assist requirement hierarchy developed, vice versa; requirements can also feed function architecture development. This chapter is concluded by overview of the functional allocation and the system synthesis.