This course aims to provide a framework for the interdisciplinary systems engineering program. It looks at the design of an engineering product or service from a systems engineering perspective and introduces methods and techniques required for a systems approach to design. This will require students to understand the concepts behind systems thinking, how to identify and define a system, how it responds to input changes and the effect of variation on the system. Through a series of lectures and group workshops students will discover the stages in the systems design process, how to carry out a requirements analysis for the system leading to a system specification and how those requirements are met through design synthesis and verification phases of the process. These requirements will be cascaded to sub-system requirements and component requirements, with emphasis placed on methods to partitioning of the sub-systems and the interaction between them. Use will be made of the generic systems design V model, trade off analysis techniques, quality function deployment approaches (QFD). The importance of modelling in the analysis of design alternatives will be covered involving the use of software tools such as MatLab and ProEngineer. Basic concepts in statistics will be introduced in order to analyse the effect of variability on design robustness. The concepts and techniques covered will be illustrated with example cases and applied to an ongoing systems design problem.

Individual Report (15%); Individual Design Assignment (15%); Group Design Report (45%); Final Exam (25%)

ENGN1211