Fundamentals of Systems Engineering by Robert Rassa

Systems Engineering is a relatively new discipline of engineering, having only reached recognizable status within the last several decades, and yet the discipline has become of extreme importance especially in the world of today’s complex systems. It turns out than some industries have been performing a form of “systems engineering” for years even though they did not call it that; product engineering, for example, in the automotive industry and commercial industries, embodies some of the important principles of systems engineering even though it is not always specified as such. Some of the significant principles of systems engineering are that it is multi-disciplined, considers the entire lifecycle of the product or system, and has as its major goal to strike a design balance between cost, schedule and performance, and all within reasonable risk. Systems Engineering is as much a philosophy of design as it is a design discipline. This tutorial will delve into all the critical principles of systems engineering, and provide emphasis on the nuances of systems engineering that many of the new practitioners tend to overlook, such as safety, security, producibility, reliability and similar.