Systems Engineering Overview
Systems and Systems Engineering
When we speak of a “system,” we may mean an engineered system, a natural system, a social system, or all three.
Since the province of Systems Engineering (SE) is engineered systems, most SE literature assumes that this is the context. Thus, in an SE discussion, “system architecture” would refer to the architecture of the system being engineered (e.g., a spacecraft) and not the architecture of a natural system outside its boundary (e.g., the solar system).
This may produce ambiguities at times: for example, does “management” refer to management of the SE process, or management of the system being engineered? In such cases, the SEBoK tries to avoid misinterpretation by elaborating the alternatives into “system management” or “systems engineering management.”
As with many special disciplines, SE uses terms in ways that may be unfamiliar outside the discipline. For example, in systems science and therefore SE, “open” means that a system is able to interact with its environment--as opposed to being "closed” to its environment. But in the broader engineering world we would read “open” to mean “non-proprietary” or “publicly agreed upon.”
Some special meanings or terms reflect the historical evolution of SE. “Systems architecting” was introduced in (Rechtin 1991) to embody the idea that better systems resulted from concurrently rather than sequentially addressing a system’s operational concept, requirements, structure, plans, and economics. “Soft SE” was introduced in (Checkland 1981) to express the criticality of human factors in SE. In both cases, the emphases that these terms imply are now accepted as integral to SE.
An extensive Glossary identifies how terms are used in the SEBoK, and shows how their meanings may vary in different contexts. As needed, the Glossary includes pointers to articles providing more detail.
For more about the definition of systems, see the article What is a System? in Part 2. For more on systems engineering see Part 3.
Section 1
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