Tutorial: An Introduction to Information-Centric Systems Engineering

Technical Abstract

In September, 2000, the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland, College Park, was awarded a significant three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for Combined Research and Curriculum development in Information-Centric Systems Engineering (NSF CRCD). The foundation of our vision for systems engineering research and education lies in the observation that among all the problems that development of complex engineering systems presents, synthesis at the "system level" is the next significant challenge in engineering education. Key challenges ahead are the systematic modeling of complex systems, and their many components and subsystems, at the appropriate abstraction, in a multitude of engineering disciplines so that engineering design and production can be planned and executed completely with computers using appropriate information representations. To keep the complexity, management, and cost of developments in check, abstraction of multiple disciplines to properly annotated information representations and re-use of previous work at all levels of development will be essential.

The long-term objective for our work is development and wide dissemination of an information-centric systems engineering curriculum that enables multi-disciplinary development and communication through appropriate information abstractions and representations. To this end, we are developing an entirely new curriculum for the Systems Engineering core of our Master of Science in Systems Engineering (MSSE) Program, composed of three semester-long courses:

  1. ENSE 621: Systems Model Building and Analysis. Using data, information and knowledge relevant to an organization's measures of effectiveness, students learn how to synthesize, articulate and refine the goals of a complex engineering system through the use of use cases, scenarios (i.e., fragments of typical system usage), generation of requirements from scenarios, which in turn leads to high-level simplified models of system behavior and system structure. Students learn how to use object-oriented diagramming procedures (e.g., UML), decompositions, hierarchies and abstraction to describe the behavior, structure, and the information contained within their designs.

  2. ENSE 622: Systems Requirements, Design, and Trade-Off Analysis. Students learn about requirements engineering, requirements traceability, co-design of system function and system architecture, methods for decision analysis and multi-objective trade-off analysis. In the latter part of the course, students learn how to model quantitatively requirements and constraints and either constraints or performance metrics. This framework serves as an introduction to quantitative procedures for decision analysis, system optimization and multi-objective trade-off analysis.

  3. ENSE 623: System Testing, Verification and Validation. This course explores the benefits and conditions necessary for making system testing, verification and validation an integral part of system design, beginning in the earliest phases where corrections are easiest and cheapest to make.

After the need for an Information-Centric approach to Systems Engineering has been fully motivated, this tutorial will systematically review the key principles and techniques in each of the three semester-long core courses. The practical application of these principles will be demonstrated through a variety of small case study applications (e.g., system-level specification and design of traffic intersections, vending machines, elevators in a building) currently in development. For a detailed preview of the ENSE 621 portion of the tutorial, please see the web page http://www.isr.umd.edu/~austin/ense621.html .

Biographies

[Austin] Mark Austin

Mark Austin is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research (ISR). For the past six years, Mark Austin has been Director of the Program for Master of Science in Systems Engineering (MSSE). He is also Associate Director of the Systems Engineering and Integration Laboratory at ISR, and past co-chair of the Commercial Practices Interest Working Group (CPIWG) at INCOSE.

In this joint capacity, Mark has led the design and development of MSSE curricula, most notably the course notes and web courseware for our new Systems Engineering core. During the past five years, 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 Austin is the co-PI (together with Dr. Baras as PI) of the NSF CRCD project focused on Systems Engineering

[Baras] John Baras

John Baras is a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Institute for Systems Research (ISR), and Computer Science. Professor Baras was founding Director of the ISR from 1985 to 1991. In 1990 he was appointed to the Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering. Since 1991, Dr. Baras has been Director for the Center for Hybrid and Satellite Communication Networks. Dr. Baras is a Fellow of the IEEE. He has consulted extensively with industry and government on various automation and telecommunication problems both in the US and Europe.

In the late 1980s, Dr. Baras was the initial principal architect of the ISR M.S. Program in Systems Engineering. More recently, he has been heavily involved in the development of courses for quantitative methods for systems engineering. These include courses on systems modeling, systems engineering fundamentals, trade-off analysis tools and systems integration. In these efforts he has incorporated some of the more advanced research results from the ISR research program including integrated product process design, integrated network management, semiconductor management and control. He has taught material on these in the University of Maryland MSSE program and as an advanced seminar course at MIT in 1998, entitled "Systems Engineering Fundamentals: Quantitative Methods." Dr Baras is the PI (with Mark Austin as Co-PI) of the NSF CRCD project focused on Systems Engineering


Tutorial Support Material

Duration. Full-Day.

Min/Max Participants

Minimum enrollment = 10 students.
Maximum enrollment = 60 students.

Intended Audience

The intended audience is practicing systems engineers and academics interested in learning about the principles and practical application of information-centric systems engineering.

Course Prerequisites

Familiarity with the basic principles of Systems Engineering.

Learning Objectives

The learning objectives are as follows:

  1. To understand why an Information-Centric approach to Systems Engineering will be important in the near future.
  2. To become familiar with key principles and techniques in Information-Centric Systems Engineering.
  3. To understand how these principles can be applied to the frontend system-level development of everyday engineering systems (e.g., design of a traffic intersection).

Presentation Requirements and Tutorial Handouts

This tutorial will be a summary of the ENSE 621-622-623 sequence of classes given at the University of Maryland. The presentation will be approximately 250 slides of material projected through a web browser (not PowerPoint).

Our plans are to give students print versions of the slides and a CDROM containing web-versions of the case study problems and background material on systems modeling with UML.

Contact Information

Professor Mark Austin,
Institute for Systems Research,
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742.
Phone: 301-405-6627
Fax: 301-405-6707
E-mail: austin@isr.umd.edu
Web: http://www.isr.umd.edu/~austin

Professor John Baras,
Institute for Systems Research,
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742.
Phone: 301-405-6606
Fax: 301-405-6707
E-mail: baras@isr.umd.edu
Web: http://www.isr.umd.edu/~baras