Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the basic principles of the systems engineering discipline and explains its relevance and importance to successfully execute a project in the foreseen time span and allocated budget which meets all its requirements. Whereas the definition of terms and terminology follows the standard of the International Council of Systems Engineering (INCOSE), a comparisons to space tailored standards defined by NASA and ESA is provided. The basic concepts of project planning are introduced, describing the statement of work, statement of compliance, work breakdown structure, and organisational breakdown structure. These are highly relevant tools for the proper definition of the contractual framework of a project that clearly defines the expectations and obligations. The initial project schedule is introduced as an important means to estimate the overall project duration prior to its start. It is then replaced by the working schedule which monitors the actual state and reflects potential delays accrued during the project execution. The early detection of delays and the understanding of the underlying reasons allow the project responsible to take early corrective actions. This helps to recover or at least minimise potential negative implications on the project (e.g., a budget overrun). The precedence diagramming is presented as a method to put the various activities into the required sequence of execution. The identification of the critical path is needed to identify all those work packages that could potentially delay the overall project duration which is demonstrated using the example of a TT&C antenna deployment. The need to identify potential risk factors for a project and to describe and track them in a risk register, is emphasised. The definition of system hierachies allows to decompose a system into subsystems and trace specific functions and requirements to them which simplifies the development, verification, and integration activities. The definition of life cycle stages decomposes a project into different phases that are characterised by a set of mile stones and gates, at which it must be decided whether to proceed from one stage to the next one. The Vee model being one of the most prominent life cycle models in SE is explained in more detail. Whereas plan-driven or waterfall models adhere to a strict sequence of how the life-cycle stages and processes are executed, incremental and iterative development methods are described as an alternative approach that allow to adjust the system design based on intermediate user inputs, before delivering the final product. Furthermore, the main concepts of model based systems engineering (MBSE) and other agile SE methods are outlined. Finally, the need for quality assurance is explained which defines the set of standards used for the specification, development, reviews, and testing in a project.
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Notes
- 1.
The INCOSE standard is based on the ISO/IEC/IEE15288:215 standard.
- 2.
Especially in larger sized projects the latency in cash flow between contractual layers can introduce additional delays and could even cause existential problems for small size companies that have limited liquidity.
- 3.
Schedule slack is an important feature that can improve schedule robustness by absorbing delays caused by unpredictable factors like severe weather conditions, logistics problems (e.g., strikes or delay in high sea ship**), or problems with LLI procurement.
- 4.
The reason is that the implementation of the site security related installations (e.g., fire detection and alarm, fences) can be performed in parallel to the other activities and need to be finalised only at the end of the project.
- 5.
If the impact of an event is desirable, it is termed opportunity.
- 6.
Larger scale NASA space projects with development times spanning several years can be adversely affected by the annual (fiscal year) budget approval by the United States Congress.
- 7.
This heuristic rule suggests that at each level any component in a system should not have more than 7 ± 2 subordinates.
- 8.
This implies that any further change needs to follow the applicable configuration control process.
- 9.
Guidance for the organisation and conduct of reviews can be found in existing standards (see e.g., ECSS-M-ST-10-01C [10]).
- 10.
An example for this is the failure of the Ariane 5 maiden flight on 4 June 1996 which could be traced to the malfunctioning of the launcher’s inertial reference system (SRI) around 36 s after lift-off. The reason for the SRI software exception was an incorrect porting of heritage avionic software from its predecessor Ariane 4 which was designed for flight conditions that were not fully representative for Ariane 5 (see ESA Inquiry Board Report [13]).
- 11.
In the agile Scrum framework, increments are also referred to as “sprints”.
- 12.
The product backlog is defined in [20] as an emergent, ordered list of what is needed to improve the product and is the single source of work undertaken by the scrum team.
- 13.
Pair programming (also known as collaborative programming) is a coding methodology that involves two developers collaborating side-by-side as a single individual on the design, coding and testing of a piece of software: one controls the keyboard/mouse and the other is an observer aiming to identify tactical defects and providing strategic planning [22].
- 14.
E.g., all code must undergo successful unit testing prior to release.
- 15.
The traditional SE approach is therefore also sometimes referred to as textual based SE approach.
- 16.
The DO-178B standard was actually developed by the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) in the 1980s and has more recently been revised (refer to DO-178C [29]) in order to consider modern development and verification techniques used in model-based, formal, and object-oriented development [30].
- 17.
This can either be the OS of the host computer or a the one from a Virtual Machine (VM).
- 18.
The detection of dead code can be achieved by either source code inspection or is the outcome of structural coverage measurement campaign.
- 19.
The term ship** her refers to any kind of transfer, be it an electronic file transfer, postal transfer of media, transfer via road or railway, or even a container ship crossing the ocean.
- 20.
For dust sensitive components like a satellite certain clean room facilities at the receiving end might be necessary and need to be ready.
- 21.
Candidate documents for this could be the configuration status accounting report (CSAR) or the software configuration file (SCF).
- 22.
A possible intermediate state is the so called qualified pass (QP) which can be used if a non expected behaviour or anomaly has occurred during the test execution which however does not degrade the actual functionality being tested.
- 23.
Some readers might strongly disagree with this statement but the author still dares to express this as his personal view.
- 24.
In some projects the term product assurance (PA) is used instead.
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Nejad, B. (2023). Systems Engineering. In: Introduction to Satellite Ground Segment Systems Engineering. Space Technology Library, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15900-8_2
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