TY - GEN
T1 - An elemental decomposition of systems engineering
AU - Salado, Alejandro
N1 - Funding Information:
The systems engineering community has recently focused on understanding what the theory of systems engineering might be and on contributing to develop it further [1-6]. Past research efforts focused on mathematically describing systems and systems engineering [7, 8], while current research explores the intersection of theories in diverse domains to further advancing the field of systems engineering [5]. Both efforts have contributed with foundations that have seeded the development of promising systems engineering methods (e.g. [7-11]), have identified fundamental flaws in some of the existing systems engineering methods (e.g. [12-15]), and have provided mathematical frameworks or results that enable moving the practice from heuristic-based to theory-based (e.g. [6, 7, 16, 17]). However, the research community still lacks a common framework under which they can measure the goodness of the various methods it develops. In fact, we are currently unable to characterize the merits of the different methods under different contexts, which would enable a practitioner to understand which methods to use when. This has been frequently voiced by the community in workshops funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2018/11/26
Y1 - 2018/11/26
N2 - A part of the systems engineering and engineering design community has voiced a need to measure the goodness of systems engineering and engineering design methods or approaches. Such measurements could enable assessing the merits of novel approaches and methods and, ultimately, compare the situations and contexts in which one of them would be preferred over the other ones. Notwithstanding the complexity of such endeavor, this paper presents an elemental decomposition of systems engineering that can be used for characterizing systems engineering methods or approaches. The proposed model builds on understanding systems engineering as the application of strategies to realize systems. The proposed elemental decomposition consists of four elements, which represent the potential effects that any systems engineering activity may have on the system development: set an order on the solution space, change the content of the design space, shape beliefs on the order of the solution space, and shape beliefs on the solution space. Such characterization could eventually be useful to compare the structure and behavior of different systems engineering methods.
AB - A part of the systems engineering and engineering design community has voiced a need to measure the goodness of systems engineering and engineering design methods or approaches. Such measurements could enable assessing the merits of novel approaches and methods and, ultimately, compare the situations and contexts in which one of them would be preferred over the other ones. Notwithstanding the complexity of such endeavor, this paper presents an elemental decomposition of systems engineering that can be used for characterizing systems engineering methods or approaches. The proposed model builds on understanding systems engineering as the application of strategies to realize systems. The proposed elemental decomposition consists of four elements, which represent the potential effects that any systems engineering activity may have on the system development: set an order on the solution space, change the content of the design space, shape beliefs on the order of the solution space, and shape beliefs on the solution space. Such characterization could eventually be useful to compare the structure and behavior of different systems engineering methods.
KW - Definition of systems engineering
KW - Strategic engineering
KW - Systems science
KW - Theory of systems engineering
KW - Value of systems engineering
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85059972159&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85059972159&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/SysEng.2018.8544457
DO - 10.1109/SysEng.2018.8544457
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85059972159
T3 - 4th IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering, ISSE 2018 - Proceedings
BT - 4th IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering, ISSE 2018 - Proceedings
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 4th IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering, ISSE 2018
Y2 - 1 October 2018 through 3 October 2018
ER -