Speaker: Erik Herzog
Venue: Stockholm (17. April 2013)

One way to put it is to say that the objective of systems engineering is to perform as little work as required to ensure the creation of a successful system. The term, as little work a required is choosen deliberately to be a bit provocative, but it must be acknowledged that Systems Engineering is not adding anything to a system, except that lubrication that makes engineers from different disciplines interact successfully. Yet there has been a tendency for systems engineers to maximize their project contribution – making systems engineering that dreaded bureaucracy that is dreaded by everyone.

In this talk we take a look at Systems Engineering from a system property perspective. A system is characterized by its properties. Be it physical such as weight or shape, functional in tems of the services offered or properties capturing system -ilities such as safety, security or maintainability. For any complex system there are typically multiple view created. Some are abstract like the stakeholder view, the system requirement view, the system design view. There are normally a physical architecture view capturing the system detailed design, and then there is the realised system, as built and as maintained.

The challenge from a systems engineering perspective is to ensure that all relevant properties are captured, with a minimal amount of redundancy. The challenge is of course how to do it? There are, of course no single approach that provides an optimal solution, but it is an interesting subject to discuss and debate.