Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Management, 3rd Edition

Preface

This third edition represents significant changes from the previous two. While the core material has been preserved, evolutionary changes in teaching and professional practice related to decision making in systems engineering and management had transformed both environments substantially, an effect only made more pronounced by the COVID‐19 outbreak in 2020 and subsequent social interaction restrictions.

Ten years of teaching, applied systems decision support, and systems assessments have yielded valuable opportunities and insights. Project sponsors and clients expressed interest in understanding system modularity and integration levels as new and more network capable technologies were becoming part of Army operations, and recognizing advances that industry had already embraced. Deterministic modeling, while still useful, was universally recognized as needing extensions capable of addressing decision makers' personal risk, principally because of the high costs associated with system development and acquisition. In response, we developed a new technique called realization analysis that directly leverages Monte Carlo simulation to address this concern, providing decision support in a manner previously overlooked.

We continued our support for deployed or isolated analysts possessing limited access to specialty software, yet still needing to accomplish many of the tasks associated with systems discussed in previous editions. Open source and freely accessible software took ...