Fundamentals of systems engineering

Lectures: 1 session / week, 2 hours / session

Complex aerospace and related systems like aircraft, satellites, ships, ground vehicles and launch vehicles consist of thousands of different parts that all work together to achieve one or more value-added functions. Examples of such functions are transporting people and goods from one place to another or gathering and disseminating information from remote locations. The parts can be hardware, software or "humanware". Humans are indeed an integral part of these systems as designers, operators, passengers and maintainers. This also applies to other non-aerospace systems such as complex consumer products, medical devices and so forth.

We use the term "stakeholders" to identify people and organizations that have an interest in the system's success. Systems Engineering is a discipline whose aim it is to coordinate all design and management activities during technical projects in a way that the outcome meets requirements and that these requirements satisfy stakeholder needs. In other words systems engineering is about designing and managing the parts, their interfaces and their collective behavior in a way that produces the intended outcome.

Best practices and formal methods of systems engineering have emerged since the 1950's and have been codified in a number of standards and handbooks, including:

These standards are very helpful in giving structure and consistency to the systems engineering process. In this class we will learn about the most important standards and the major steps and methods that support the design and management of aerospace systems. Given the fact that this is a 6-unit / 5-ECTS-credits class, this introduction will necessarily be cursory and provide a general overview, rather than an in-depth treatment. Skillful and experienced systems engineers acquire their craft over the course of many years by participating and leading numerous projects. Hence, this class should be considered merely as a "door opener" to the world of systems engineering.

Unfortunately, the current state of knowledge and recommended practices in systems engineering are far from perfect. If they were we would not witness cost and schedule overruns in many aerospace projects (such as the recent Boeing 787 Dreamliner project) and major accidents such as aircraft crashes1 and launch vehicle failures2 would not exist. Indeed, as aerospace system's performance has increased dramatically they have also become more complex, and so has the challenge of designing and managing them.

In other words Systems Engineering is evolving and we are still grappling with significant challenges such as making these systems more affordable and user friendly, while ensuring system safety in all operating modes. As a result new approaches to systems engineering such as the DARPA META approach and Model-Based-Systems-Engineering (MBSE) are emerging and these are also covered briefly in the class. The purpose of Meta for example is to avoid the costly design iterations and late "surprises" during system testing by applying a new set of computer-based systems engineering tools. The key idea of MBSE is to replace documents (on paper or in electronic format) with executable models.

The students in this class will be able to achieve the following learning outcomes:

Note: It is not an explicit objective of this class to prepare students for the Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP) examination. However, students are encouraged to pursue this certification on their own should they choose to do so3.

Our main "textbook" for the class will be the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook, NASA/SP-2007–6105, Rev. All students taking this class will have read the textbook in its entirety by the end of the term.

The class consists of five pedagogical elements that are interwoven to maximize the use of individual, group and class time. These elements are lectures, assignments, readings, exams and the design competition. The overall structure of the class following the "V-Model."

Fig.1: The structure of the 16.842 / ENG-421 class follows the "V" model. Session numbers are indicated with a number between 1–12. (Courtesy of Prof. Olivier de Weck.)

The grading will occur on the letter scale A-F following standard MIT grading policy (A is the best) and on the 1–6 grading scale at EPFL. The grade conversion table below shows the corresponding grades in the different grading systems. The Northern America scale applies at MIT. The EPFL scale obviously applies at EPFL.

The grade itself will be composed as follows:

There will be the following assignments in this class:

1To be fair, the safety record of commercial aviation has improved dramatically since the 1960s.

2The most recent example is the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch failure on June 28, 2015.

3See International Council on Systems Engineering for more details about certification.

4The concept questions are administered using Google Forms. Students respond by using a short URL from their laptops, tablets or mobile phones in real time.

5Measured based on concepts question responses, class attendance and in-class contributions

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