Systems Engineering

Systems engineering concerns itself with the creation, sustainment and retirement of complex engineered systems. This chapter will go over the motivations behind systems engineering and how engineering students and practitioners should think about it. Given the challenges typically experienced in defining a field with such a large scope, the chapter proposes an axiomatic approach to delineating the domain of systems engineering. The chapter then discusses the various stages in system development lifecycle, using commercial product development process as the testbed. This is following by a discussion of some critical domain-independent knowledge that all systems engineers should possess. Finally, the increasing importance of systems concepts as a result of new technologies such as digital twins, AR/ VR, human–robot collaboration, is discussed.