"Learning aid" for systems engineering with Interface-Component Model (I-CM)
Yordan Tuzsuzov is a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology and conducts research in the field of systems engineering. In this guest article, he presents a pragmatic approach for a lightweight system architecture.
A more detailed description of the approach in English, as well as an example implementation in Excel, are on Yordan's website to find.
Guest article by Yordan Tuzsuzov
Despite the evolution of systems engineering methods, notations and tools (SysML and other MBSE), many organizations still have no formal systems engineering at all. Some of them did not have a real need until recently (the products were not so complex and multidisciplinary), some did not have a business case where the investment was found to pay off. This means that in reality there is a need for an increase in SE, which is much simpler and cheaper than "full-blown" SE or MBSE, but can open the doors for it.
If we reduce the scope from the systems to the technical systems (not the whole enterprise as in DoDAF or MODAF), the proposed method can be useful for this.
Systems Engineering
Systems engineering comprises components (things), interfaces (collaboration) and functions (the goal)
The General definition of a system is "a group of things that work together to achieve a common goal". This is because our SE approach must encompass and represent the three main concepts of this definition, namely the components (things), interfaces (collaboration) and functions (the goal). The I-CM approach, a development that I made in the course of my master's thesis research, offers such a possibility. The basic view of I-CM (abbreviation of "Interface-Component Model") looks like this:
It is important to note here that this is not DSM is. The table above shows the components and the interfaces as two different dimensions of the systems. This allows each interface to show its own identity and effect - e.g. an interface can connect more than two components (like an interface bus or a screw connection that holds several parts together), two components can have more than one interface between them, etc. This view also helps to consider the interfaces with the same importance as the components. But why is this so important? One of the most important rules in systems theory is that systems provide more value than the sum of their components. This added value comes from the interactions between the components, in other words: from the interfaces. If we do not sufficiently design and verify these interfaces (such as the components), we risk not achieving the added value of the systems!
The Mapping between functions and form on the other hand, is nothing new - with the lower part of the table you can easily create the link. However, with the already established link between components and interfaces, the small I-CM table has basically covered the entire system. Thanks to the three-way link between interface-component-function, it is easy to track in the I-CM - what a "minimal viable product" looks like, what system coverage a functional test has, or even to carry out an impact analysis of structural or functional changes.
Use in development
I-CM can cooperate well with other approaches. The information from I-CM is sufficient to generate a DSM and use it as a clustering tool. The "form-to-function" linking is standard as with QFD and can be used there for further analyses, etc.
However, a practical implementation of I-CM requires a bit more information than the simple table above, so the approach includes some additional documentation and quantitative fields. A simplified example shows a radio set documented with I-CM:
You can find out everything there is to document and analyze with the I-CM directly at see in the XLS example (in the "User Manual" tab). Furthermore on this website A short discussion about the importance and significance of interfaces in a system.
Conclusion
After all, I-CM is a very simple SE approach that is intended as an introduction to systems engineering and does not compete with the MBSE or enterprise systems. Nevertheless, I-CM offers possibilities that can be helpful in many cases, even if the "SE learning aid" period is over.
