Abstract

Despite 30 years of history, systems engineering still means many things to many people. A few of the most commonly used texts contain at least 20-30 definitions of systems engineering. At first this leads you to believe that "systems engineering is all things to all people," which of course runs the danger of delivering almost nothing to most. To avoid falling into that trap, we are pragmatic and very explicit about what systems engineering means to us:

For this vision to be realized, we need methodologies for the synthesis of systems from modular components, support for team developments, ways to handles large volumes of heterogeneous data and, of course, procedures for quantitative decision making. The "front-end" part of our definition and focus is key because this is where decisions have the largest impact on commitment of funds in a project and, also, greatest opportunity for improvements. From a research perspective, I think systems engineering is in exactly the same spot as finite elements, late 1960s. The problems aren't simple, but there are lots of opportunities for important contributions.

Using NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Project as a motivating example, we will review state-of-the-art procedures for requirements engineering, and identify the capabilities and limitations of systems engineering tools used by mainstream US Industry (e.g., General Electric, Lockheed Martin). A key observation in our work is that requirements engineering processes and the Internet are both chaotic systems-of-systems and, as such, the former can benefit from advances in the latter. We will create a research agenda for using Semantic Web technologies to mitigate limitations in present-day requirements engineering capability, and describe three ongoing research projects: (1) Java-enabled diagram technology; (2) An XML/RDF traceability viewer; and (3) Formal methods for the bottom-up synthesis of modular systems with real-time rule checking.

Biography

Mark Austin is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with joint appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research (ISR). Mark has a B.E. (First Class Honors) from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and M.S. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) degrees in Structural Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

For the past six years, Mark Austin has been Director of the Master of Science in Systems Engineering (MSSE) Program. He is also Associate Director of the Systems Engineering and Integration Laboratory at ISR, and past co-chair of the Commercial Practices Interest orking Group (CPIWG), International Council of Systems Engineering (INCOSE). In this joint capacity, Mark has led the design and development of a new MSSE core curricula. See, for example, ENSE 621: Systems Modeling and Analysis . The relevance and utility of our curricula has been field-tested through development and delivery of two- and three-day systems engineering short courses at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, General Electric Information Systems (GEIS), and General Electric Transportation Systems (GETS). Mark has published approximately 50 papers and is principal author of Introduction to Engineering Programming in C, MATLAB, and Java , published by John Wiley and Sons, 1998.