Courses

EM.411 Foundations of System Design and Management

Presents the foundations of systems architecture, systems engineering and project management in an integrated format, through a synchronized combination of in-class discussion, industrial guest speakers, team projects, and individual assignments. Topics include stakeholder analysis, project planning and monitoring, requirements definition, concept generation and selection, complexity management, system integration, verification and validation, cost modeling, systems safety, organizational design and effective teamwork, risk management, and leadership styles. Restricted to students in the SDM program.

MIT catalog entry: http://student.mit.edu/catalog/search.cgi?search=Em.411&style=verbatim

Sloan Executive Education: Managing Product Platforms

This course introduces participants to the concept of “commonality," or product platforms, the sharing of components, processes, technologies, interfaces and/or infrastructure across a product family. Successful product platforming allows companies to develop better products more easily, improve product family planning and lifecycle management, and increase corporate profitability.

MIT catalog entry: http://executive.mit.edu/openenrollment/program/managing-product-platforms

16.89 Space Systems Engineering

Focus on developing space system architectures. Applies subsystem knowledge gained in 16.851 to examine interactions between subsystems in the context of a space system design. Principles and processes of systems engineering including developing space architectures, developing and writing requirements, and concepts of risk are explored and applied to the project. Subject develops, documents, and presents a conceptual design of a space system including a preliminary spacecraft design.

MIT catalog entry: http://student.mit.edu/catalog/m16b.html#16.89

Systems Engineering, Architecture, and Lifecycle Design: Principles, Models, Tools, and Applications

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.

MIT short program: http://web.mit.edu/professional/short-programs/courses/systems_architecture.html