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3Chapter
System Architecture
Engineering Principles
3.1 The Importance of Principles
System architecture engineering (SAE) should be founded on a consistent set of underlying prin-
ciples that drive how it should be performed and the work products that it should produce. ese
principles should be reasonably small in number and at a high level of abstraction. ese principles
should also be clearly identifiable, well defined, and have rationales based on experiences and prac-
tical lessons learned during the engineering of real system architectures. Because we have found
the following SAE principles to be fundamental and a foundation on which S