System Architecture: Strategy and Product Development for Complex Systems, First Edition
by Daniel Selva, Bruce Cameron, Edward Crawley
14.1 Introduction
The job of a system architect is to transform a set of needs and goals into a system architecture. For complex systems, the task of architecting is challenging, because the complex relationships between design parameters and their alternatives introduce a massive search space that challenges both humans’ and computers’ abilities to exhaustively process the space. This chapter argues that a system architecture can be effectively represented as a set of interconnected decisions. It should be no surprise that we consider these decisions as a system—they have entities (the decisions) and relationships (the connections between the decisions). These decisions are an intermediate system, between the system of needs and the final architecture. ...
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