Systems Engineering Definitions

Systems Engineering: A Team Approach

Systems engineering (SE) is a multidisciplinary approach to product lifecycle realization. SE allows one to better understand each product as a whole and to improve the planning, design/development, manufacturing, and maintenance processes. Organizations use SE to model and analyze the interactions, needs, subsystems, constraints, and interactions among system components and to optimize and trade off important decisions throughout the product lifecycle (Fig. 1.1.1). Systems engineers use a variety of modeling techniques and tools to capture, organize, prioritize, deliver, and manage system information throughout an entire product lifecycle. SE attempts to capture and prioritize customer requirements at the front end and then—using functional modeling, object-oriented methods, status charts, etc.—to make alternative assessments, down to the functional and physical divisions of the product (Fig. 1.1.2).