Mark Simons once found himself sitting in a circle at his then 8-year-old daughter’s yoga class. Participants went around and introduced themselves, explaining what they did for a living. Realizing that no one in the room would be likely to know about systems engineering, Simons thought quickly about how to …

System of Systems (SoS) — A system of systems (SoS) brings together a set of systems for a task that none of the systems can accomplish on its own. Each constituent system keeps its own management, goals, and resources while coordinating within the SoS and adapting to meet SoS goals. …

Last time, we covered the first three of our nine laws of effective systems engineering. Law #1 – Begin with the End in Mind; Law #2 – It Doesn’t Help to Solve the Wrong Problem; and Law #3 – Insight Is the Goal. Today we encounter the next three: Law …

The Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge* defines a model as “a simplified representation of a system at some particular point in time or space intended to promote understanding of the real system.” There is broad acceptance that models are limited or simplified representations of a reality of interest. There is …