Systems Engineering

I highly recommend that you read Dave Baldwin's autobiography Snake Jazz. It has some baseball stuff, but it is highly entertaining. His philosophy on life is that, if you lose a game, don't blame society. Just go back and work harder.

Systems Engineering is an interdisciplinary process that ensures that the customer's needs are satisfied throughout a system's entire life cycle. This process is comprised of the seven following tasks: Stating the problem, Investigating alternatives, Modeling the system, Integrating the system, Launching the system, Assessing performance, and Re-evaluation. This process can be summarized with the acronym SIMILAR (Bahill and Gissing, 1998). My What Is Systems Engineering? directory has a paper and a slide show that describes the systems engineering process.

My Systems Engineering Process is use case based, which means that we start with the use cases, using the use cases we discover the requirements, and from the requirements we develop the risk analysis. The most recent example of this process is the the PopUp Coach. The use cases are in document 6.

Here are abstracts for a series of seminars and short courses that Bahill has given many times world wide.

The following posters describe various aspects of the systems engineering process. You are welcome to use them.

• A Man with a Hammer (200 Kbytes)
• A Man with a Hammer (Warning this is BIG, 7 Mbytes)
• First Steps of the System Design Process (144 Kbytes)
• The System Design Process (121 Kbytes)
• Cost and Influence of Each Phase of the System Life Cycle (40 Kbytes)
• Functional Decomposition (98 Kbytes)
• Systems Engineering is a Fractal Process (48 Kbytes)
• Systems Engineering is the Glue That Holds it all Together (56 Kbytes)
• Growth of The Systems Engineering Documents (87 Kbytes)

Here is a list of my major publications. And this directory has Adobe .pdf files of some of the papers published over the last five years.

Bahill has done research on the Science of Baseball. If you are interested, go to this baseball directory. Most of these papers a co-authored with Dave Baldwin. Dave and I presented a paper at the baseball research conference (SABR 36) in Seattle, June 29, 2006. Slides of our presentation are right here. (The file is 6 Mbytes.)

Here are some carefully worded definitions about systems and states. I had lots of help in writing this.

Terry Bahill is Founding Chair Emeritus of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Fellows Selection Committee. This committee has created a Letter of Support Form and guidelines for nominating potential INCOSE fellows. They are in the INCOSE Fellows directory. This area also has biographical sketches of the INCOSE Fellows. I stopped updating this directory in 2004 when INCOSE central took it over.

I do not think that slides are a good handout to accompany a presentation, but so many people have asked me for copies of my slides, that I have decided to make them available in my slides directory. I have also put a program for computing Wymorian Scoring Functions in this directory. Feel free to download any or all of these.

Here are a few things on objected-oriented systems engineering: the kangaroo myth, a small part of the "Design Methods Comparison Project" abstract, slides, a template for writing UML use cases and the slides for the paper "Using object-oriented and UML tools for hardware and algorithm design: A case study" are available in my slides directory.

Pinewood contains the complete documentation for the design of a Pinewood Derby. In particular it has several examples of tradeoff studies. Here is the the Pinewood Derby chapter from Chapman, Bahill and Wymore.

Wayne Wymore is the theoretician for our Systems Engineering community. I have his photograph, his autobiography, two of his theoretical papers on Systems Engineering, and a lecture he gave in my class in this directory dedicated to Wymore.

Bahill, K. Bharathan and Richard F. Curlee have made Childhood Stuttering: A Second Opinion®. It is a decision support system that was designed to help with the diagnoses and prognoses of young children who might have begun to stutter.

For the lighter side of lexicology, look at my laugh directory.

Here is a review of the book The Ghost of the Executed Engineer (3 Kbytes).

The Discovering System Requirements directory has a paper that describes the requirements process.

I am often asked about systems engineering tools. For now I will just refer you to the INCOSE tools site.

Some good examples of the Wymorian documentation are in this directory, which was created for SIE-454/554 students.

Object-oriented modeling and design students (SIE-277) students should look in this directory.

Students in my graduate course Model-based System Design (SIE-654) should look in this directory.

This site belongs to Terry Bahill: (520) 621-6561. The last major change was made on October 16, 2008.

This site is mirrored by Tony Sprinzl of the Vienna University of Technology.