Systems engineering: Program empowerment for 21st century aerospace projects (original) (raw)

2014, IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine

The unprecedented technical complexity and integration required in today's aerospace operations is staggering compared with ten years ago. Aerospace systems today are complex "systems of systems" that require the integration of established, legacy equipment and new and diverse technologies. Integration often results in less system behavior predictability, increasingly complex development, and implementation challenges. Aerospace companies are incorporating advancements in traditional areas like material science, propulsion, aerodynamics, electronics, and stability and control. They are also bringing technological advancements into previously unrelated areas, like advanced computing for autonomous aircraft flight and obstacle avoidance, data and network security to prevent energy interception and interpretation of proprietary data, and introducing new advancements, like system autonomy, to drastically improve efficiency. The incorporation of modern technology into these previously untouched areas requires expertise in a broad range of engineering disciplines. The tight fiscal environment has produced a heavier reliance on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products, more modifications to existing designs, and longer system life cycles. This often means adapting the business to the COTS solution instead of creating a solution that best fits a company's unique business environment, making temporary workarounds the norm, and maintaining equipment and systems well past their peak usefulness. Additionally, a greater emphasis is placed on enhancing performance on existing contracts rather than investing in new or custom development. International collaboration has provided some relief, but it has also led to challenges related to information and data security, logistics, global supply chain management, quality control, and the necessity to integrate products that were built all over the world to varying specifications and standards of quality. The emergence of multiple prime/subcontractor teams has forced projects to face wide geographic distributions and the difficult task of integrating many companies and organizations. Finally, the aerospace field is increasingly regulated and is witnessing the emergence of strong, international competition (Figure 1). These are just a few of the challenges faced by today's aerospace projects.