Systems Engineering and Other Disciplines

The intellectual content of most engineering disciplines is largely component-oriented and value-neutral. The level of the components will vary by discipline. For example, aircraft engineers will need to need to know how to integrate various mechanical, electrical, and informational components, and to address human operator concerns, but they will generally consider the aircraft as their system of interest, and will consider the baggage handling, airport layout, and ground traffic management systems to be part of their environment. They may consider various tradeoffs such as range vs. payload, but their criteria will primarily be on various aspects of aircraft performance or robustness, and less likely to involve aspects of stakeholder value other than technical proxies such as fuel efficiency.

The underlying laws and equations of these disciplines, such as Ohm’s Law, Hooke’s Law, Newton’s Laws, Maxwell’s equations, or the Navier-Stokes equations, deal with aspects of their system of interest’s performance. But they generally do not address the contributions of this performance to the value propositions of the aircraft’s owners, passengers, operators, maintainers, manufacturers, and safety and pollution regulators. As implicit in the INCOSE definition of systems engineering, the intellectual content of realizing successful systems involves reasoning about the relative value of alternative system realizations to success-critical stakeholders, and about the organization of components and people into a system that satisfies the often-conflicting value propositions of the success-critical stakeholders. Thus, compared to other engineering disciplines, the intellectual content of SE is more holistic vs. component-oriented, and more stakeholder value-oriented vs. value-neutral performance-oriented.

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--Nicole.hutchison 20:44, 16 August 2011 (UTC)