Systems Engineering Principles and Practice, 2nd Edition

14PRODUCTION

14.1 SYSTEMS ENGINEERING IN THE FACTORY

The production phase of the system life cycle represents the culmination of the system development process, leading to the manufacture and distribution of multiple units of the engineered and tested system. The objective of this phase is to embody the engineering designs and specifications created during the engineering development stage into identical sets of hardware and software components, and to assemble each set into a system suitable for delivery to the users. Essential requirements are that the produced system performs as required, is affordable, and functions reliably and safely as long as required. To fulfill these requirements, systems engineering principles must be applied to the design of the factory and its operations.

Most of the discussion in this chapter is concerned with the production of hardware system elements. On the other hand, as noted in Chapter 11, almost all modern products are controlled by embedded microprocessors. Thus, production tests necessarily include testing the associated software.

This chapter is organized in four main sections. It begins with Engineering for Production, which describes where production considerations must be applied during each phase of system development in order to ensure that the end product is both affordable and satisfies performance and reliability goals. The section Transition from Development to Production describes the problems typically encountered in the transfer ...