Systems Engineering Tools and Practices

Abstract

In order to deal with the complexity of systems engineering designs for modern systems, formalized methods and tools have been created to allow documentation, communication, and comparison of systems and software architectures [65]. These methods and tools all focus around the creation of different drawings, each with their own set of standards, each designed to aid in the design, implementation, and manufacturing phases of overall system development, operations, and maintenance. As has been discussed throughout this textbook, the system must be defined through with a complete multidisciplinary lifecycle perspective in order to capture all of the requirements, needs, and goals of the customer. The overall objective is to develop a complete lifecycle-balanced system. As system complexities have increased over the decades, the Systems and Software Engineering tools have evolved to keep up with changing system designs (e.g., service-based systems, agile development methods, etc.) [35].