Introduction to the SEBoK
The SEBoK provides a widely accepted, community-based, and regularly updated baseline of systems engineering (SE) knowledge. This baseline will strengthen the mutual understanding across the many disciplines involved in developing and operating systems. Shortfalls in such mutual understanding are a major source of system failures, which have increasingly severe impacts as systems become more global, interactive, and critical. Ongoing studies of system cost and schedule failures (Gruhl-Stutzke 2005; Johnson 2006) and safety failures (Leveson 2012) have shown that the failures have mostly come not from their domain disciplines, but from lack of adequate SE.
Topics
Each part of the SEBoK is divided into KAs, which are groupings of information with a related theme. The KAs in turn are divided into topics. This KA contains the following topics:
SEBoK Purposes
To provide a foundation for the mutual understanding, the SEBoK describes the boundaries, terminology, content, and structure of SE. In so doing, the SEBoK systematically and consistently supports six broad purposes, described in Table 1.
| # | Purpose | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inform Practice | Inform systems engineers about the boundaries, terminology, and structure of their discipline and point them to useful information needed to practice SE in any application domain. |
| 2 | Inform Research | Inform researchers about the limitations and gaps in current SE knowledge that should help guide their research agenda. |
| 3 | Inform Interactors | Inform performers in interacting disciplines (system implementation, project and enterprise management, other disciplines) and other stakeholders of the nature and value of SE. |
| 4 | Inform Curriculum Developers | Inform organizations defining the content that should be common in undergraduate and graduate programs in SE. |
| 5 | Inform Certifiers | Inform organizations certifying individuals as qualified to practice systems engineering. |
| 6 | Inform SE Staffing | Inform organizations and managers deciding which competencies that practicing systems engineers should possess in various roles ranging from apprentice to expert. |
The SEBoK is a guide to the body of SE knowledge, not an attempt to capture that knowledge directly. It provides references to more detailed sources of knowledge, all of which are generally available to any interested reader. No proprietary information is referenced, but not all referenced material is free—for example, some books or standards must be purchased from their publishers. The criterion for including a source is simply that the authors believed it offered the best generally available information on a particular subject.
The SEBoK is global in applicability. Although SE is practiced differently from industry to industry and country to country, the SEBoK is written to be useful to systems engineers anywhere. The authors were chosen from diverse locales and industries, and have refined the SEBoK to broaden applicability based on extensive global reviews of several drafts.
The SEBoK aims to inform a wide variety of user communities about essential SE concepts and practices, in ways that can be tailored to different enterprises and activities while retaining greater commonality and consistency than would be possible without the SEBoK. Because the world in which SE is being applied is evolving and dynamic, the SEBoK is designed for easy, continuous updating as new sources of knowledge emerge.
SEBoK Uses
The communities involved with SE include its various specialists, engineers from disciplines other than systems engineering, managers, researchers, and educators. This diversity means that there is no single best way to use the SEBoK. The SEBoK includes use cases that highlight ways that particular communities can draw upon the content of the SEBoK, identify articles of interest to those communities, and discuss primary users (those who use the SEBoK directly), and secondary users (those who use the SEBoK with assistance from a systems engineer). See the article SEBoK Users and Uses.
References
Works Cited
Gruhl, W. and Stutzke, R. 2005. "Werner Gruhl Analysis of SE Investments and NASA Overruns," in R. Stutzke, Estimating Software-Intensive Systems. Boston, MA, USA: Addison Wesley, page 290.
INCOSE. 2012. Systems Engineering Handbook: A Guide for System Life Cycle Processes and Activities, version 3.2.2. San Diego, CA, USA: International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). INCOSE-TP-2003-002-03.2.
Johnson, J. 2006. My Life Is Failure: 100 Things You Should Know to Be a Better Project Leader. Boston, MA, USA: Standish Group International.
Leveson, N. 2012. Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Pyster, A., D.H. Olwell, T.L.J. Ferris, N. Hutchison, S. Enck, J.F. Anthony, D. Henry, and A. Squires (eds). 2015. Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering (GRCSE), version 1.1. Hoboken, NJ, USA: The Trustees of the Stevens Institute of Technology ©2015. Accessed on 4 December 2015 at BKCASE.org http://www.bkcase.org/grcse-2/.
Primary References
INCOSE. 2012. Systems Engineering Handbook: A Guide for System Life Cycle Processes and Activities, version 3.2.2. San Diego, CA, USA: International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). INCOSE-TP-2003-002-03.2.
Pyster, A., D.H. Olwell, T.L.J. Ferris, N. Hutchison, S. Enck, J.F. Anthony, D. Henry, and A. Squires (eds). 2015. Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering (GRCSE™), version 1.1. Hoboken, NJ, USA: The Trustees of the Stevens Institute of Technology ©2015. Accessed on 4 December 2015 at BKCASE.org http://www.bkcase.org/grcse-2/.
Sage, A. and W. Rouse (eds). 2009. Handbook of Systems Engineering and Management, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Additional References
Bertalanffy, L. von. 1968. General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, Revised ed. New York, NY, USA: Braziller.
Blanchard, B. and W. Fabrycky. 2010. Systems Engineering and Analysis, (5th edition). Saddle River, NJ, USA: Prentice Hall.
Booher, H. (ed.) 2003. Handbook of Human Systems Integration. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley.
Checkland, P. 1999. Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley.
Hitchins, D. 2007. Systems Engineering: A 21st Century Methodology. Chichester, England: Wiley.
SEBoK Discussion
Please provide your comments and feedback on the SEBoK below. You will need to log in to DISQUS using an existing account (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or create a DISQUS account. Simply type your comment in the text field below and DISQUS will guide you through the login or registration steps. Feedback will be archived and used for future updates to the SEBoK. If you provided a comment that is no longer listed, that comment has been adjudicated. You can view adjudication for comments submitted prior to SEBoK v. 1.0 at SEBoK Review and Adjudication. Later comments are addressed and changes are summarized in the Letter from the Editor and Acknowledgements and Release History.
If you would like to provide edits on this article, recommend new content, or make comments on the SEBoK as a whole, please see the SEBoK Sandbox.
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