Abstract
The development of a civil aerospace gas turbine engine within the required timescale and resource constraints presents a considerable challenge. How does a team of hundreds of engineers organize itself, not just to design the thousands of high technology components required, but to manage their interactions in order to ensure that the engine operates according to customer expectations and continues to function safely even in the event of a malfunction? In organizing the work, some elements map onto established systems principles, fitting well the model of a functional system. Other elements map less well and present a challenge to current thinking, which this paper explores.
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Acknowledgements
All endeavours at Rolls-Royce including this paper are a result of teamwork. The contributions of many colleagues with whom the authors have discussed the concepts described here are hereby gratefully acknowledged. As is apparent from multiple references, the Systems Engineering approach at Rolls-Royce draws heavily upon training material developed by Stuart Burge of Burge Hughes Walsh.
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Holt, J., Elam, D., Tooke, J. (2020). Gas Turbine Design at Rolls-Royce – Exploring the Limitations of a Systems Engineering Approach. In: Boy, G., Guegan, A., Krob, D., Vion, V. (eds) Complex Systems Design & Management. CSDM 2019. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34843-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34843-4_1
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