How to approach designing large systems for the team
This page is a work in progress
The rocket we develop, as well as its ground support systems have gotten very complex over the years. The old ways of working on chunks of the rockets systems in a vacuum and only thinking in detail about integration at the end are not conducive to complex designs working successfully. Moving forward we should be thinking about designing systems from the top down, and closely examining each component within them.
Currently the goal of this document is to try to summarize literature & ideas that exist on the best way to approach integration of systems. A lot of it is based on the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook1, which is NASAs guide to it’s own systems engineers and project managers on how to effectively approach systems design. Not everything in this book is applicable to what we do on the team, for NASA is an extremely large and bureaucratic organization, but I am trying to boil down the essence of their process to something that can be applied on the team.
My intention is to try to apply this process through the design of the 2023 competition rocket, and avoid integration issues in the short months before competition.
Complex technical projects can only be managed by addressing the whole life cycle
Requirements should be defined in order to provide a description of the functionality of the system = Functional architecture.
Elaborate on these functional requirements to create a functional description of subsystem requirements.
Subsystem functional requirements are allocated to physical configuration items to provide a system Physical Architecture
This process reduces
** purpose of requirements analysis framework page 45, [2]
“ Time invested in getting requirements correct significantly reduces technical, schedule, and financial risks in system acquisition” [2-p47]
Initial Requirements
Systems Architecture
“The system architecture can be seen as the strategic organization of the functional elements of the system, laid out to enable the roles, relationships, dependencies, and interfaces between elements to be clearly defined and understood.”
The whole goal is to make sure that elements that are designed separately, will be able to work together
… Roman transfer the rest of your notes here …
Preliminary Design
It is vitally important that all subsystem requirements analysis is performed from the same functional baseline or system specification. […] different functional baselines have been known to exist on projects, resulting in incompatible and conflicting preliminary and detailed designs. [2]
[1]https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering-handbook
[2] “Managing Complex Technical Projects - A systems Engineering Approach”, R. Ian Faulconbridge, Michael J. Ryan, Book (available from the UW library)
[3]
[4]