Systems Engineering in Research and Industrial Practice

The system concept has existed for several decades now, but is still a viable concept to be used to denote a problem area and to adopt a holistic view. The essence of a system is that it consists of elements and relationships between these elements, and that it exerts a function in its environment, provided it is an open system. A system can be defined at different layers of abstraction consisting of sub-systems, which themselves may consist of subsystems again. The most complex level includes human beings. The system concept is adopted in Systems Engineering (SE) in which not only the engineering system under development is modeled, but also the development process itself in which many different disciplines need to be involved depending on the (lifecycle) requirements in focus. In this introductory chapter we draw the way we have paved to provide this book from the first idea on. The system concept, the origins, the goals and the expected audience of this book are roughly described. Finally, we give the first insight in the structure of this book and the mutual interdependence of the chapters. This book contains many different contributions in the area of SE, categorized into 4 parts: an introduction to the concept, methods and tools, applications, and challenges.

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.

The chapter presents the usage of Ideation Methods in the Systems Engineering context. The first part presents the classification of ideation methods. This classification is based on different criteria to allow designers take a look from different points of view. There is also a discussion about presented division of ideation methods and how to choose the right method for a given case. The second part deals with background and review of the most popular methods with special attention paid to the analysis of Ideation Methods in complex and multidisciplinary projects over the last few years. The definitions of discussed methods are given in this part. This description concerning with the classification can be a quick way to get to know the issue of ideation methods. This approach allowed us to elaborate guidelines concerning the usefulness of the analyzed Ideation Methods in Systems Engineering. Special attention has been put to methods that have been commonly used in the recent case studies. The presented two case studies describe the usage of selected methods in given examples from the field of designing and development of medical devices as well as automotive industry. The main theme of this chapter is classification of ideation methods and their characteristics. It should help to choose the right ideation method to realize the ideation phase in context of Systems Engineering. The reading of this chapter should result in the evaluation of the value of ideation methods depending on the application. The conclusions sum up guidelines concerning the usage of Ideation Methods and indicate the direction of changes and improvements in these methods.

The design, manufacturing and through-life support of modern engineering systems such as an aircraft or a frigate are complex, multifaceted and may change over time. These engineering systems are working in an environment that has multiple individual users, complicated supply chain, many government and socially affected stakeholders. In essence, these systems are working as a system of interacting semi-autonomous systems each of which are governed by their individual set of rules and could operate with different enterprise structures. Engineers trying to apply the theory of systems engineering to “design” a system of systems find the outcome often unpredictable and uncontrollable, as the linked systems operate with high degree of independence. System operations are embedded in business networks that are evolving and changing all the time. Individuals and organisations participate voluntarily in the networks. They can come and go at any time without warning. This highly uncertain relationship requires a different approach. This chapter will address the modelling requirements to design, develop, implement and operate a complex system that interacts with many socio-technical systems. The methodology is illustrated by two case studies.

A rapidly growing strategy in product design and manufacture, with great potential to improve customer value, is mass-customization. The main idea is to divide the product into modules that can be shared among different product variants. This will support a wide range of options for the end customer to select among, while an internal efficiency, similar to mass-production, can be achieved. This has been a success for many companies acting on the consumer market. However, many manufacturing companies are engineer-to-order (ETO) oriented, such as original equipment suppliers (OES). They design a unique solution, often in close collaboration with other companies. The solution can then be manufactured in different quantities depending on the client’s need. For these companies, there is a strategic need for developing high quality engineering support to further utilize and exploit the information and knowledge produced during product development and to succeed with a strategy influenced by the principles of mass-customization. This has to include the implementation and management of systems enabling highly custom-engineered products to be efficiently designed and manufactured. One challenge when introducing such flexible support is to enable traceability of decisions taken, tasks executed, knowledge used and artefacts developed throughout the whole lifecycle of an individual product. In this chapter, it is shown that traceability can be achieved by introducing support for capturing, structuring and mapping between decisions and resulting outputs, such as geometrical building blocks, knowledge implemented as rules, and the argumentation for the selection, design and specification of these. Three examples are presented where the concept Design Description has been modelled based on an item-oriented, a task-oriented, and a decision-oriented perspective which show the generality of the Design Description concept. The three examples demonstrate how to use the Design Description to enable traceability in platform design, product design, and manufacturing development processes.

The crosscutting technical management process facilitates both the systems design and product realization processes. The eight sub-processes within the crosscutting technical management process are: technical planning, requirements management, interface management, technical risk management, configuration management, technical data management, technical assessment, and decision analysis. The technical management processes make the link between project management and technical team. Subsequently, individual members and tasks are integrated into a functioning system that meets cost and schedule pre-requisites. The crosscutting functions serve to execute project control on the apportioned tasks. In this chapter, we will put our focus to explain decision analysis and interface management. Decision analysis is the process of making decisions based on research and systematic modeling of tradeoffs. The objective of a decision analysis is to discover the most advantageous alternative under the circumstances. Decision analysis may also require human judgement and is not necessarily completely machine driven. In detail, we show how to conduct the trade study. While interfaces are connection points between parties or elements, interface management provide a systematic methodology to handle with multiple parties or technical elements. Implementing an interface management process on a project identifies critical interfaces, streamlines communication, and monitors ongoing work progress while mitigating risks. Under interface management, we provide interface definition, identification and interface management tools.

There has been a shift in emphasis within systems from hardware-oriented to more software-oriented topics integrated in an overlaying communication framework (e.g., cloud-based services). This chapter presents current research in the field of the interaction between mechatronic and cyber-physical systems. It presents solution basics design methods that are illustrated by some real-world applications. The discussed case studies (Smart Home, Bio-mechatronic Systems, Cyber-Physical Production System, Data-driven analysis) provide illustration of applications involving different functional distributions of activity between the 4 key elements of people, data, mechatronics and cyber-physical system.

Product-Service Systems (PSSs) are a new emergent way to innovate traditional products and to extend the company portfolio, by reducing time and cost while offering high quality and meeting the expectations of both customers and stakeholders, which have to be considered during the design and development process (Complex systems concurrent engineering. Springer, London, pp. 321–328, 2007 [1]). A further challenge is to close loops between Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) by providing feedback from service delivery to the beginning-of-life phase of products, or defining a structured procedure to coordinate product and service development activities. The objective of this chapter is to provide a common understanding about PSSs, to deepen the Servitization process and its main features, and to understand how PLM and SLM can be integrated to define future organization of PSS-oriented companies. The final aim is to present PSS as a new business model, which companies can adopt to innovate their products and to enlarge their offer to the market, according to a consumer-oriented approach.

A city is a complex system, requiring the input of multiple disciplines for its (re)design. It shares some properties of two kinds of objects: empirical objects as well as theoretical objects. As city emerges as a complex object for multi-disciplinary studies, it is of the highest importance to adopt a systemic and global approach in order to bring new knowledge to this field. To master the growing complexity of cities and to consider in the same spot heterogeneous ways of thinking of city, we need intellectual tools and models. The goal of this paper is to propose a model for describing engineering modelling knowledge with relationships and transformations between four domains: (1) citizen, (2) functional, (3) physical and (4) process. The proposed model is structured on four levels of modelling: (1) conceptual (2) mathematical (3) computational and (4) experimental. These network of models should be necessary intelligent for managing the engineering design of a smart city. For overall city design, the paradigm should change from planner-centric to citizen-centric. However, while these models are potentially relevant, data that may feed these models is lacking most of the time. Moreover, filling and detailing each of the models, requires additional input from different experts and theories. In this chapter smart city engineering design will focus on three interrelated approaches: (a) data that should be gathered, (b) models that can be used by means of these data, and (c) interpretation methods and tools to elaborate knowledge and decision from the results these models can produce. The paper presents some findings from the application of the proposed meta-model.

Main problems occurring in Product-Service Systems (PSSs), are due to an inadequate requirements analysis and lack of a strong PSS conceptual design. Problems vary from exceeding budgets, to missing functionalities, unsuccessful market launch, or even project abortion. Furthermore, the special characteristics of a PSS have to be considered already at an early stage of the development process. Requirements Engineering (RE) and design methodology as well as supporting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) need to establish a common perception of the targeted PSS. At the same time, the inner complexity of PSS leaves requirements analysis, design activities and development tasks fragmented among many disciplines and sometimes conflicting, unstable, unknowable or not fully defined. In this context, a concurrent, transdisciplinary and collaborative design of PSS is required to create feasible and successful solutions. The objective of this chapter is to present a structured approach to face the specific challenges of PSS development in detail, to elaborate a general framework that features a systematic approach for PSS development, and to consider the effects of changes in specific product and service design on a systematic PSS development process.

Machining is the traditional product shaping process by removing materials from a block of original materials. Practically, the machining process itself has not changed much in the last couple of centuries but the accessories around the process have improved significantly, like data logging features in modern computer numerically controlled machines. The machining process is a system, the components of which should be considered as independent units which work harmonously with other systems in the enterprise. In this chapter a systems approach is adopted to examine methods and techniques that can improve five key performance indicators of the machining system, i.e. sustainability, accuracy, efficiency, precision and reliability. In particular, High Speed Machining, tool breakage prevention, thin wall deflection, tool geometry and chatter monitoring are studied in relation to the five performance indicators, respectively. Application of these techniques has produced good machining outcomes showing strategic development direction leading to better performance of the machining system.

Brazil as an emerging country needs to catch up with technology to extend its position on the international market, especially in the space sector. The Technology Nationalization Framework (TNF) is a strategy for nationalization and industrialization of high technology products. The TNF is meant to assure that strategic technologies, that are currently lacking, will be designed, produced, and operated in Brazil as long as needed, without the risk of export bans or unavailability of components. The framework is based on reengineering with subsequent transfer to the national industry. The strategy starts with the identification of strategic technologies in relation to technologies already present in Brazil. For the nationalization process of these technologies a decision-making process is needed taking into account available resources and competencies. In this chapter the TNF will be introduced and explained, while also a pilot project is described in which the TNF strategy is applied.

Nowadays, sustainability has established itself in the automotive industry and has evolved to an indispensable part of it. In contrast with its initial understanding as ecological improvement during development and production of vehicles, it has emerged to an advanced concept that considers much more, for instance the interaction of vehicles with the superordinate system they are included in. Therefore, not only the reduction of the pollution as well as of the resource consumption, but also the impact on the societal, economic and environmental development are of great importance. The current product development in many companies is still characterized by the fact that different disciplines create several partial models of the same product and provide many information only in documents. Periodic synchronizations of common parameters and models are performed. Information related to sustainability even when it exists is not consistent and not represented in models, which can be used for synchronization points. Therefore sustainability is often not really taken into account along the product life cycle. In order to master the complexity of smart products, which arises from customer behavior and requirements, but also from legal requirements related to sustainability, a proposal is made for Systems Engineering to integrate sustainability to a greater extent. Based on the main research directions over sustainability, such as innovative design concepts including alternative propulsions for less pollution, the safety and driver assistance for resource efficiency and life protection, the mastery of networked vehicles for instance to control the interaction of car with its superordinate system, adapted and even new methods as well as processes are needed in order to link Systems Engineering with Sustainability. This paper presents proposals of product development processes that take Systems Engineering methods into account as well as sustainable mobility. The prerequisites to realize such a product development process are described, whereby the whole product development cycle from the product concept down to disposal is taken into account.

Systems Engineering (SE) is a well-established field of research and practice. Nevertheless, the theory underlying SE is experiencing significant development, directly and in association with advancements in closely associated research domains. In this final Chapter, a socio-technical perspective is applied to identify and describe major trends in SE, as well as identifying future challenges in theory and application of SE. In doing so, trends are identified for (1) strategic issues from a product and process lifecycle perspective; (2) stakeholder representation and involvement; (3) current and future technologies employed to enable SE; (4) knowledge and skills as contributed by people and teams; and (5) structures to enable transdisciplinary activities supporting a socio-technical system perspective in systems development. Challenges remain present regarding these dimensions; SE requires methods and tools that are suitable to support the dynamic and evolving nature of the systems that need to be developed including the development system itself. Besides, management of SE projects for solving complex societal problems requires people with vision and power to motivate and mobilize the necessary people and value their respective input in the overall task. Transdisciplinary Engineering is introduced as an approach in which Systems Thinking and System Approaches interoperate, taking into account the different levels of abstraction of the system of focus.