Systems Engineering Education Training: Systems engineering deals with work-processes, optimization methods and risk management tools in such projects.
Systems engineering is nearly omnipresent and gaining in importance every day as technology marches toward greater system complexities. Systems engineering ensures that all likely aspects of a project or system are considered, and integrated into a whole.
As it stands today, systems engineering overlaps technical and human-centered disciplines such as industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, manufacturing engineering, control engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, cybernetics, organizational studies and project management.
While the term systems engineering can be traced back at least to the 1940s, to this day no single, universal definition of the term exists. Frequently, systems engineering is defined by the context in which it is embedded.
According to one definition of the classical practice, systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to translating users’ needs into the definition of a system, its architecture and design through an iterative process that results in an effective operational system. Systems engineering applies over the entire life cycle, from concept development to final disposal.
Systems Engineering Life Cycle
The systems engineering life cycle is a term to describe a process for planning, creating, testing and deploying an information system. This life cycle concept applies to hardware and software configurations. Usually the life cycle has six stages:
- Analysis
- Design
- Development and testing
- Implementation
- Documentation
- Evaluation
However, in practicality, the system life cycle is rarely, if ever, as linear as this most discussions might imply. There are often iterative cycles, skipped phases, overlapping elements, etc.
Another consideration is that important processes and activities apply to more than one phase in a system life cycle, which are better envisioned as threading through or overarching the other building blocks — risk identification and management for example.
Numerous variations on the classical systems engineering life cycle can be found, including incremental or spiral developments that mitigate uncertainties in long-range requirements or funding of the system under development as well as evolutionary approaches for navigating uncertainties in enabling technology maturity.
Want to learn more about system engineering principles, approaches, current and future trends? Tonex offers dozens of courses in nearly 30 topic areas including: Scada Training, Smart City, Smart Grid, Sensors and Data Fusion, Tactical Data Links, Aerospace and Advanced Systems Engineering Certification.
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