Assaying the importance of system complexity for the systems engineering community

How should organisations approach the evaluation of system complexity at the early stages of system design in order to inform decision making? Since system complexity can be understood and approached in several different ways such evaluation is challenging. In this study we define the term ``system complexity factors'' to refer to a range of different aspects of system complexity that may contribute differentially to systems engineering outcomes. Views on the absolute and relative importance of these factors for early-lifecycle system evaluation are collected and analysed using a qualitative questionnaire of INCOSE members (n=55). We identified and described the following trends in the data: there is little between-participant agreement on the relative importance of system complexity factors, even for participants with a shared background and role; participants tend to be internally consistent in their ratings of the relative importance of system complexity factors. Given the lack of alignment on the relative importance of system complexity factors, we argue that successful evaluation of system complexity can be better ensured by explicit determination and discussion of the (possibly implicit) perspective(s) on system complexity that are being taken

A Network Perspective On Assessing System Architectures:Foundations and Challenges

Organizations are increasingly faced with the challenge of architecting complex systems that must operate within a System of Systems (SoS) context. While network science has offered usefully clear insights into product and system architectures, we seek to extend these approaches to evaluate enterprise system architectures. Here, we explore the application of graph-theoretic methods to the analysis of two real-world enterprise architectures (a military communications system and a search and rescue system) and to assess the relative importance of different architecture components. For both architectures, different topological measures of component significance identify differing network vertices as important. From this we identify several significant challenges a system architect needs to be cognisant of when employing graph-theoretic approaches to evaluate architectures; finding suitable abstractions of heterogeneous architectural elements and distinguishing between network-structural properties and system-functional properties. These challenges are summarized as five guiding principles for utilizing network science concepts for enterprise architecture evaluation

The rank reversal problem in multi-criteria decision making : a literature review

Despite the importance of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques for constructing effective decision models, there are many criticisms due to the occurrence of a problem called rank reversal. Nevertheless, there is a lack of a systematic literature review on this important subject which involves different methods. This study reviews the pertinent literature on rank reversal, based on 130 related articles published from 1980 to 2015 in international journals, which were gathered and analyzed according to the following perspectives: multicriteria technique, year and journal in which the papers were published, co-authorship network, rank reversal types, and research goal. Thus our survey provides recommendations for future research, besides useful information and knowledge regarding rank reversal in the MCDM field

Using a Serious Game Development Approach in the Learning Experience of System Engineering Design

Part 6: Gamification of Complex Systems Design DevelopmentInternational audienceThis is a position paper, presenting also some preliminary results of an experiment in teaching and learning systems engineering design. Students were asked to develop games in conjunction with a system design project. We have measured the effects of the game development on the learned skills, via feedback questionnaires. The preliminary results indicate that students find the game development difficult but also like this aspect the most from the whole coursework. In terms of skills, the ability to adopt a holistic view is considered the most valuable by the students