As Hurricane Sally crawls toward the Louisiana shores of the Gulf of Mexico, her 80 mph sustained winds are no match for the lashing 150 mph gust of her category 4 older sister Laura. But where Laura strode into Lake Charles, Louisiana driving her swath of damage forward at a …

There have been a number of attempts at generating a mathematical definition of a system, dating back to at least Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s now classic book, General System Theory, published in 1968. The systems engineering community would benefit greatly from such a definition, which would define a system precisely in …

In last month’s blog, Modeling SysML Activities in GENESYS, I discussed how to model behavior using activity diagrams. What, though, are interactions? Interactions are a UML concept brought over into SysML that can be used as an alternative approach for modeling behavior in SysML. Interactions are distinct from activities and …

In any system design project there are always three systems of importance. The first of these is what we call the system of interest or the solution system. That is the system we intend to design. (Note: For the purposes of this discussion, the name “system of interest” may be …