Chapter 1.2. The Systems Engineering Process

Systems engineering is a multidisciplinary approach to develop balanced system solutions in response to diverse stakeholder needs. Systems engineering includes the application of both management and technical processes to achieve this balance and mitigate risks that can impact the success of the project. The management process is applied to ensure that development cost, schedule, and technical performance objectives are met. Typical management activities include planning the technical effort, monitoring technical performance, managing risk, and controlling the system technical baseline. The technical processes are applied to specify, design, and verify the system to be built. The practice of systems engineering is not static, but continues to evolve to deal with increasing demands.

A simplified view of the systems engineering technical processes is shown in Figure 1.1. The System Specification and Design process is used to specify the system and component requirements to meet stakeholder needs. The components are then designed, implemented, and tested to ensure that they conform with their requirements. The System Integration and Test process includes activities to integrate the components into the system and verify that the system requirements are satisfied. These processes are applied iteratively throughout the development of the system, with ongoing feedback between the different processes. In more complex applications, there are multiple levels of system decomposition beginning at an enterprise or SoS level. In those cases, variants of this process are applied recursively to each intermediate level of the design down to the level at which the components are purchased or built.