Model Based System Engineering

Foreword

Technology plays a key role in humankind’s fervent and ceaseless striving to improve safety, comfort, and efficiency. This has, in turn, resulted in an accelerating progression of technological innovation, commencing with primitive hand tools all the way through to modern, highly sophisticated software-driven systems. As the capabilities of these technological marvels become increasingly more elaborate, so do our appetites for ever more complex automated support systems: autonomous vehicles, “intelligent” robots, “smart” homes, and even “smart” cities.

The cost of this technological progress is a commensurate, almost exponential increase in the complexity of our technologies – complexity that can be, and often is, overwhelming. The modern discipline of systems engineering has emerged as a means of coping with this phenomenon. Although, as the author of this volume points out, system engineering is much older than System Engineering, starting with ancient “mega projects,” such as the Pyramids of Ancient Egypt, it is only within the last seven decades or so that the problem of constructing and operating complex systems has evolved into a fully-fledged technical discipline in its own right.

This book is a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the latest and most advanced form of systems engineering – model-based systems engineering (MBSE). This variant of systems engineering is clearly distinguished by the central and essential role that models and modeling ...