About Course

Introduction Who Should Attend Learning Objectives Course Reading Materials Schedule About the Instructors Apply

Systems Engineering, Architecture and Lifecycle Design: Principles, Models, Tools, and Applications [6.18s]

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Date: July 27-31, 2009 | Tuition: $3,400 | Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 3.0

Updates
* Course schedule, registration times, special events

Application Deadline: June 29, 2009
* If you miss the application deadline you can request to be added to the course waiting list by emailing shortprograms@mit.edu. You will be notified if additional seats become available.

Please note that laptops are required for this course.

Introduction

System and product complexities are increasing with time due to requirements for additional functionality, higher performance, competitive cost, schedule pressures, more flexibility or adaptability, and cognition-based friendlier human interface. Academics and practitioners alike have come to realize that complex engineering systems have a set of common principles, embedded in a theory, that goes beyond and cuts across the traditional fields of engineering. Novel products and systems development require the involvement of and communication between professionals with multiple disciplinary backgrounds and other stakeholders, notably the customer. This collaboration increases the likelihood of detecting product failures early on during its lifecycle, yielding significant cuts in time to market and heavy rework expenses.

The Systems Engineering discipline has been continuously growing in response to the increase in system and product complexity. System architecture is an early critical lifecycle activity that determines the system's concept and model of operation. Nurturing systems thinking and engineering skills, the engineering education this course provides grounds intuition and experience in theory and practice. We start with general SE and Systems Architecture principles. We then introduce SysML – the new SE standard from OMG. The approach underlying the system modeling is Object-Process Methodology (OPM), a comprehensive approach to systems architecting, conceptual modeling, and lifecycle support. An integrated engineering software environment, OPCAT, which combines intuitive graphics with an automatically-generated subset of English, implements OPM and supports the modeling of the system's requirements, top-level architecture, analysis and design models that are amenable to simulation and deployment. The resulting model can be translated to SysML and it constitutes a central underlying artifact of the system, which evolves and serves as a major reference to all the stakeholders throughout the entire lifecycle.

Highlights of 2009 course

• Out-of-the-box thinking that fosters a holistic approach and creative solutions;
• Combination of systems architecting principles with two modeling methodologies – SysML and OPM – and synergies between them;
• Hands-on small-scale project based on OPM, which is emerging as an ISO standard and preferred solution for systems engineering;
• Multidisciplinary, complex project-product lifetime management.

Who Should Attend

This program is intended for system architects, systems engineers, software engineers, system integrators, analysts and designers, executives, product developers, project leaders, project heads, systems biologists, banking and financial engineers and modelers, methods engineers, and database designers and administrators.

Learning Objectives

1. Synthesize and analyze existing architecting approaches to enhancing creativity while reducing ambiguity and complexity.
2. Utilize out-of-the-box holistic system thinking in developing a system's conceptual model and architecture.
3. Define system architecture, modeling, form, function, structure and behavior.
4. Describe how a system's function emerges from its form and behavior.
5. Distinguish between the notions of system, product, service, and project, and how each creates value and competitive advantage for the enterprise.
6. Evaluate the use of OPM and SysML using OPCAT software in class.
7. Integrate complexity management with abstraction and refinement.
8. Model a combined Project-Product Lifecycle Management system and study the benefits of the project-product synergies.

Course Reading Materials

Dori, D. Object-Process Methodology: A Holistic Systems Paradigm. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, New York, 2002.

Slides and course handouts of Professor Crawley's System Architecture course.

Recommended Reading
Friedenthal, S., Moore, A., and Steiner, R. A Practical Guide to SysML: The Systems Modeling Language. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008.

Course Software

Used in industry and academia, OPCAT (academic version) is a software tool designed to support OPM. The updated version will be distributed to the students and serve as a platform to practice and apply the OPM analysis and design techniques, do the examples and case studies, and carry out the mini-project.

Please note that laptops are required for this course.

Course schedule, registration times and Special Events

Class runs 8:30 am - 5:00 pm every day except Friday when it ends
at 12:30 pm.

Registration is on Monday morning from 7:45 - 8:15 am.

Special events include a dinner for course participants and faculty on
Wednesday night. Evening activities are included in tuition.

About The Instructors

Professor Edward Crawley is the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT. He received an SB (1976) and an SM (1978) in Aeronautics and Astronautics, and an ScD (1981) in Aerospace Structures from MIT. He currently serves as the Director of the Bernard M. Gordon – MIT Engineering Leadership Program, an effort to significantly strengthen the quality of engineering leadership education for competitiveness and innovation. From 2003 to 2006 he served as the Executive Director of the Cambridge – MIT Institute. For the previous seven years, he served as the Department Head of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, leading the strategic realignment of the department.

Recently, his research has focused on the domain of architecture, design and decision support in complex technical systems that involve economic and stakeholder issues. His work spans a range from the development of underlying theory, typified by a recent paper on the Algebra of Systems, to the development of methods and tools, such as Object Process Networks and Architecture Decision Graphs. It extends as far as a consulting role on the design of actual systems. Currently he is engaged with NASA, on the design of its lunar and earth observing systems, and with BP on oil exploration system designs.

Dr. Crawley is a Fellow of the AIAA and the Royal Aeronautical Society (UK), and is a member of three national academies of engineering: the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science, the (UK) Royal Academy of Engineering, and the US National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by Chalmers University, Sweden in 2006.

A founder of ACX, a Cambridge based product development and manufacturing firm, he served as its Chairman and Chief Technology Officer from 1992 to 2000, at which time it was acquired by Cymer, Incorporated (CYMI). He is a founder and the Chairman of BioScale, a company developing biomolecular detectors. In the summer of 2007 he founded and currently serves as the Chairman of Dataxu, a Cambridge and Beijing based company in Internet Advertising Matching. In 2003 he was elected to the Board of Directors of Orbital Sciences Corporation (ORB), where he serves on the Compensation and Audit and Finance Committees.

Home page: http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/www/people/crawley/bio.html

Professor Dov Dori is Visiting Professor at MIT's Engineering Systems Division (ESD). Between 2001 and 2008 he was Head of Technion's Area of Information Systems Engineering at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, and Research Affiliate at MIT. Between 1999 and 2001 he was Visiting Faculty at MIT's Sloan and ESD. Professor Dori received his B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion in 1975, M.Sc. in Operations Research from Tel Aviv University in 1981, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, in 1988. Between 1978 and 1984 he was Chief Industrial Engineer of the MERKAVA Tank Production Plant. His research interests include Model-Based Systems Engineering, Systems Development and Lifecycle Methodologies, Information Systems Engineering, Computer Aided Software Engineering and Web systems engineering. Dov Dori has developed the Machine Drawing Understanding System (MDUS) and Object-Process Methodology (OPM). Between 1999 and 2001 Prof. Dori was Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI). He is Associate Editor of Systems Engineering, INCOSE's flagship journal. He is author/co-editor of four books and author of over 130 publications. Prof. Dori is Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, and a member of INCOSE. He has been consultant and invited lecturer for companies including Pratt and Whitney Canada, Ford Motor Company, FAA, NASA, The MITRE Corporation, Xerox, Kodak, and others.

Home page: http://iew3.technion.ac.il/Home/Users/dori.phtm

* A limited number of partial-tuition scholarships are available. You may submit a scholarship request by filling out the Scholarship Request Form no more than two weeks after your application to the course has been submitted. Please note that these scholarships are only for partial tuition and do not cover travel, lodging, or other expenses associated with the course. Incomplete requests and requests that are not preceded by a course application will not be reviewed.

If you have any questions please contact the Short Programs office.