Global Journal of Engineering, Design & Technology
Open Access

Systems Engineering and Related Subject Areas

Beatrice Sambo^{* *}Correspondence: Beatrice Sambo, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, USA, Email:

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Description

A multidisciplinary area of engineering and engineering management known as systems engineering focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over the course of their lifetimes. In order to systematize this corpus of information, systems engineering fundamentally applies systems thinking ideas. An engineered system, which is one result of such efforts, is a collection of elements that combine to effectively carry out a beneficial function as a whole.

Dealing with large or complex projects makes it more challenging to address issues like requirements engineering, reliability, logistics, team coordination, testing and evaluation, maintainability, and many other disciplines required for successful system design, development, implementation, and ultimate decommissioning. In these projects, systems engineering works with work processes, optimization techniques, and risk management tools.

Industrial engineering, production systems engineering, process systems engineering, mechanical engineering, manufacturing engineering, production engineering, control engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, cybernetics, aerospace engineering, organizational studies, civil engineering, and project management are just a few of the technical and human-centered disciplines that it crosses over with. Systems engineering makes ensuring that every potential facet of a project or system is taken into account and integrated into the overall design.

Systems engineering topics

Tools for systems engineering are methods, procedures, and techniques that facilitate the application of systems engineering to a project or item. The objectives of these tools range from document production to neutral import/export to database management, graphical browsing, simulation, and reasoning.

Systems engineering processes: All human, creative, and technological tasks required to define the product as well as those required to transform a system definition into a sufficiently through system design specification for product manufacturing and deployment are covered by systems engineering procedures. There are four stages of system design and development, each having a distinct definition:

• Task definition

• Conceptual stage

• Design stage

• Implementation stage

Using models: Models are crucial to systems engineering and have many different uses. There are various approaches to define a model, including:

• A reality-based abstraction created to address a specific realworld query

• A copy, analogue, or representation of a structure or process found in the real world

• A tool that can be intellectual, mathematical, or physical to help someone make a decision.

Together, these definitions are comprehensive enough to cover mathematical models used in the trade study process, schematic models like a functional flow block diagram, and physical engineering models used in the verification of system designs.

Related fields and sub-fields

Systems engineering may be thought of as strongly connected with many related topics. The following fields have helped systems engineering grow into a separate discipline:

Cognitive systems engineering: A specialized method for describing and analyzing sociotechnical or human-machine systems is known as cognitive systems engineering. The three fundamental concerns of CSE are how people deal with complexity, how labor is done using artifacts, and how sociotechnical systems and human-machine systems can be viewed as joint cognitive systems.

Configuration management: Configuration management is a widespread systems-level discipline used in the defense and aerospace industries. Configuration management performs tasks that are similar to those of systems engineering. For example, while systems engineering is concerned with requirements development, allocation to development items, and verification, configuration management is concerned with requirements capture, traceability to the development item, and audit of the development item to make sure it has achieved the desired functionality that systems engineering and/or Test and Verification Engineering have proven out through objective testing.

Control engineering: Systems engineering includes the wide subfield of control engineering, which is utilized extensively in almost every industry for the design and implementation of control systems. Examples include the ballistic missile guiding system and the cruise control on a car.

The study of solution spaces and the creation of fresh techniques for the analysis of the control process are key components of the current field of applied mathematics known as control systems theory.