This book is meant to be a basic text for courses in the engineering design of
systems at both the upper division undergraduate and beginning graduate
levels. The book is the product of many years of consulting on numerous
portions of the system development process, research into the use of systems
engineering in industry, and six years developing a course on the engineering
design of systems. During the development of this book, I found that many
engineers did not understand systems engineering. Even those that do may not
have a good perspective on a complete and unified process for engineering a
system. The desire to suppress the number of decisions being made during
design is quite strong in most engineers. While engineers have learned modeling
throughout their academic life, and most have developed models during the
practice of engineering, very few engineers working on systems are knowledgeable
of the modeling techniques required in systems engineering. In addition,
most engineers are not aware of methods for using models during the systems
engineering process. As a result, I adopted the following themes in formulating
this book:
1. Defining the design problem in systems engineering is one of several keys
to success and can be approached systematically using engineering
techniques.
2. The design problem in systems engineering is defined in terms of
requirements. These requirements evolve from a high-level set of mission
and stakeholders’ requirements to detailed sets of derived requirements.
3. The design process will fail if the requirements are defined too narrowly,
leaving little if any room for design decisions.