A practitioner's view of system engineering

Tradeoff studies are the core technology of the system engineer during the early design effort. The system engineer creates tools to analyze performance, reliability, human interfaces, and cost. The entire life of the system is fixed by the system engineers' imagination during the initial design. After drawings are released, the principal activities of the system engineer are the resolution of intersubsystem conflicts and the documentation of delivered products. This paper describes planed and unplanned growth in large-scale systems and offers examples. (Various kinds of performance analysis tools are described, that are used for electrical and mechanical systems.) Perfect optimization of cost requires the owner to issue bonds to pay for higher quality products from savings in maintenance and operations. There is a dose relation between project management, system engineering, proposal preparation, and cost estimating, The design process has been bureaucratized, especially on projects paid for by large noncompetitive organizations. The result has been a trend to rote project management by technically illiterate lawyers and MBAs. This paper concludes with a projection of the future of system engineering in information processing, biological systems, infrastructure, and macroeconomics.