Ways to visualize the system engineering process Essay

System Engineering is a multidisciplinary approach to engineering development that focuses on how to design and manage complex systems over their life cycles. One of the traditional ways to visualize the system engineering process is the "Vee Model".
The first step is to define the system boundaries. How your system will fit into the customer usage. It's important that people in different sectors of the overall system interact and understand the boundaries.
The system usage definitions can be captured as a series of use case models. This will help create a set of system requirements that is not limited to a particular architecture or implementation. The usage definitions detail what the environment is for the system within the use cases.
After defining a good model of the customer's end system and usage, and the inputs and outputs of the elements within your environment, you can engineer a potential solution that meets the customer needs. It's through customer interactions that use cases are confirmed and revised, and changes can be incorporated.
System requirements definition and analysis is a fundamental step during the planning phases. This must be done with the minimum amount of architecture definition possible in the requirements. Each of the requirements must trace back to the usage model to insure the correct design. Additionally, it is important to document use conditions at this stage. The use conditions may uncover additional requirements not clearly evident in the initial stages of requirements gathering and analysis.
At this stage, it is important to involve all of the stake holders, including the end customer to verify the requirements and their intent. It is critical to make sure these requirements are registered in a way that they can be tested and verified later in the integration process.
Knowing the usage models and requirements will help create system architecture and subsystem definition best suited for the needs of the end customers. Therefore, the system architecture is usually an interactive process. Separating the logical solution from the physical solution will help to create additional alternative solutions for the system architecture. The logical solution looks into how to meet the product requirements in various ways without focusing on the technology and implementation details. The physical solution will then develop technological specific details to the solution. The iteration begins when the technological constraints and feasibility delimit the physical solution. A specific technology may not be ready to use within the time frame for the product requirements. Alternatively, it may not be adequate to the size, cost or power limits of the product.
Once the logical and physical architecture are complete for the system, the details of the subsystems can be defined. These definitions are critical for the subsystem design and later integration.
The subsystem test and performance parameters will also be an output of this phase of the process. Each subsystem should have test cases and performance indicators, which give insight not only into the subsystem interaction, but also into the overall system performance for the use cases.