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Engineering Elegant Systems: Postulates, Principles, and Hypotheses of Systems Engineering

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Systems Engineering in Context

Abstract

Systems engineering integrated both the system and the organizational engineering disciplines to produce an elegant system. The NASA Systems Engineering Research Consortium has developed systems engineering postulates, principles, and hypotheses defining the physical and social aspects of systems engineering. This paper presents an overview of the current revision of this basis for systems engineering. This basis addresses several key aspects of systems engineering including system-specific approach, organizational influences, policy and law impacts, application across the system life cycle, the mathematical basis of systems engineering, decision-making, clearly distinguishing verification from validation, and system optimization.

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Acknowledgements

Special thanks to David Rousseau at the Centre for Systems Philosophy for an excellent bibliography used to guide our references.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL, USA

    Michael D. Watson

  2. University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, USA

    Bryan Mesmer

  3. Trivector Services Inc., Huntsville, AL, USA

    Phillip Farrington

Authors
  1. Michael D. Watson
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  2. Bryan Mesmer
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  3. Phillip Farrington
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael D. Watson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Stephen Adams

  2. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Peter A. Beling

  3. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    James H. Lambert

  4. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    William T. Scherer

  5. Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Cody H. Fleming

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Watson, M.D., Mesmer, B., Farrington, P. (2019). Engineering Elegant Systems: Postulates, Principles, and Hypotheses of Systems Engineering. In: Adams, S., Beling, P., Lambert, J., Scherer, W., Fleming, C. (eds) Systems Engineering in Context. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00114-8_40

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