System Engineering - Scope

One way to understand the motivation behind systems engineering is to see it as a method, or practice, to identify and improve common rules that exist within a wide variety of systems.^{[citation needed]} Keeping this in mind, the principles of Systems Engineering — holism, emergence, behavior, boundary, et al — can be applied to any system, complex or otherwise, provided systems thinking is employed at all levels.^[18] Besides defense and aerospace, many information and technology based companies, software development firms, and industries in the field of electronics & communications require Systems engineers as part of their team^[19].

An analysis by the INCOSE Systems Engineering center of excellence (SECOE) indicates that optimal effort spent on Systems Engineering is about 15-20% of the total project effort.^[20] At the same time, studies have shown that Systems Engineering essentially leads to reduction in costs among other benefits.^[20] However, no quantitative survey at a larger scale encompassing a wide variety of industries has been conducted until recently. Such studies are underway to determine the effectiveness and quantify the benefits of Systems engineering. ^{[21] [22]}

Systems engineering encourages the use of modeling and simulation to validate assumptions or theories on systems and the interactions within them.^[23][24]

Use of methods that allow early detection of possible failures, in Safety engineering, are integrated into the design process. At the same time, decisions made at the beginning of a project whose consequences are not clearly understood can have enormous implications later in the life of a system, and it is the task of the modern systems engineer to explore these issues and make critical decisions. There is no method which guarantees that decisions made today will still be valid when a system goes into service years or decades after it is first conceived but there are techniques to support the process of systems engineering. Examples include the use of soft systems methodology, Jay Wright Forrester's System dynamics method and the Unified Modeling Language (UML), each of which are currently being explored, evaluated and developed to support the engineering decision making process.