Systems Engineering

Systems Engineering is essential for the success of projects, especially the more complex ones, which include different professional disciplines and whose partners and working groups are often geographically distributed.

Consultancy

Systems Engineering Plan Definition

The success of every project in terms of both, the performance specifications and the schedule and budget fulfillment, strongly depends on a good organization. One of the bases of this organization is the definition and the implementation of a Systems Engineering Plan. The Systems Engineering is the interdisciplinary effort that governs the global technical effort done in the project framework to transform the initial requirements into a final system.

A Systems Engineering Plan has to describe the approach, techniques, tools, organization and plan of the technical effort needed to reach the project goals. The Systems Engineering Plan functions include:

  1. To assure the integration of the different project disciplines.
  2. To implement the requirements engineering, whose goals are: to assure that the user needs are being correctly translated; to generate, control and keep a coherent set of specifications at the different system levels; and to assure the traceability between the system requirements and the subsystems specifications.
  3. To develop the analysis, needed to solve the conflicts among requirements, to study the different design alternatives and to study the project risks and their effects on the cost and the schedule.
  4. To define the configuration: the System Product Tree.
  5. To probe the System functionality and performance, by producing the verification matrix and by designing and carrying out the test plans.

RAMS Plan

The Reliability, Availability, Maintenance and Safety Plan, RAMS, includes all the considerations to take into account in the different project phases, to fulfill the requirements of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety.

Reliability and Availability Plan

The ILS (Integrated Logistic Support) includes the distribution of reliability and availability requirements among the different subsystems; the definition and development of the analysis to evaluate the requirements fulfillment and the execution of the actions to assure the reliability and availability requirements (e.g. component selections, redundant decisions, etc). These analyses include:

  1. MTBFs analysis (Mean time between failures) and MTTRs (Mean Time to Restore Service).
  2. FMECA (Failure Modes Effect and Criticality Analysis) to analyze the potential failure modes within the system identifying the hazardous event, the cause, the method of control and the corrective action.

Operation and Maintenance Plan

In parallel to the Systems Engineering Plan, a project has to define from the beginning the basis of the Operation and Maintenance Plan, which has to include the following aspects:

  1. Goal definition and Operation and Maintenance Policy.
  2. Operation tasks definition and operation restrictions.
  3. Maintenance tasks definition and maintenance restrictions including both predictive and corrective maintenance.
  4. Definition of the needed resources (personnel, workshops, tools, spares, supplies, external services and documentation) to carry out the operation and maintenance tasks.

From this Plan, the Systems Engineering will distribute requirements and restrictions to each subsystem that will have to be taken into account during the design.

Safety Program Plan

The project has to include a Safety Program and to track its fulfillment through all the project phases. This plan has to control the risks associated to both, the design and the final use of the system. This safety plan will include the safety policy and the risk levels definitions. The plan will also include the necessary analysis to study the safety of people, the facility and the equipments. The results of these analyses will provide an input for the design and for the final use.