Major Challenges facing the Practicing Systems Engineer

Synthesis from Modular Components The prevalence of synthesis from modular components is no longer true just for aerospace, defense and large government contracts (systems engineering started with Aerospace Engineering). Instead it is required in all commercial designs and operations. This so-called ``systems integration'' has become key and perhaps the most profitable engineering practice. Support for Team Development Teams of experts from multiple disciplines/domains working together on the solution of complex problems is a common requirement in industry today (e.g., integrated product teams (IPTs)). We need to maintain a shared view of the project objectives, and at the same time focus on specific tasks. A key challenge is avoiding communication and interpretation problems -- everyone needs to know what they are supposed to be working on, and when it's due! Growing Importance of Information-Driven Systems In the past, systems have been seen from an operations point of view, where information and communications have been regarded as the supply of services necessary for the system to operate in pre-defined ways. Nowadays, there is a rapidly evolving trend towards the team development of large-scale information-dominated systems, which exploit COTS and communications technologies, have superior performance and reliability, and are derived in response to various types of information drawn from a wide array of sources. Large Volumes of Heterogeneous Data Current and future data are in large volumes (not all relevant), numerically intensive (often requiring parallel algorithms for processing), multidimensional, heterogeneous, distributed, typically worked on specialized search engines, and represent multiple views (to the various users from engineering team members, to marketing, to sales people, to management, and to customers).

Section 1-2: November, 2001.