Aerospace has always been one of the core employment areas for systems engineers. Aircraft construction has the large-scale complexity that requires careful planning and oversight that systems engineers are trained to provide. This, coupled with the certification and safety aspects of aircraft make the industry both challenging and rewarding to engineers.
It was reported this month that Gulfstream overtook Bombardier as the top business jet maker by shipment value. Gulfstream shipped $1.83B (U.S) in the quarter to Bombardier's $1.59B (U.S.). Both companies do work with strong system engineering components and it's good to see shipments in such a tough market.
Aerospace has always been one of the core employment areas for systems engineers. Aircraft construction has the large-scale complexity that requires careful planning and oversight that systems engineers are trained to provide. This, coupled with the certification and safety aspects of aircraft make the industry both challenging and rewarding to engineers.
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The importance of systems engineering comes to the forefront in a recent decision by the State of Queensland in Australia to ban IBM from signing new contracts with any government department until IBM addresses its project governance issues. IBM is the prime contractor on a payroll system that ballooned from a $10 million budget to a projected total of $1.2 billion. The article points out that a series of audits, the latest being a Commission of Inquiry Investigation conducted by a former Supreme Court Justice, found that the projects difficulties were caused by poor project scope definition as well as poor governance by all parties involved.
Practicing systems engineers should note to enormous adverse impact of poor systems engineering (scope definition in this case) on the client and company. The client's costs increased 120x over the planned budget while the company may lose out on future contract opportunities. Effective scope definition and control is a key skill for every systems engineer. This case illustrates its importance and the opportunities for the profession to help projects mitigate or avoid such difficulties. It is fairly easy for all the players involved in the system definition to articulate what they want, but how exactly do you translate those into designable requirements? In this article and the follow-up part 2 the Requirements Experts blog explore exactly this issue. Well worth the read.
One of Canada's largest system engineering projects has moved forward another step. According to the Ottawa Citizen, pilots and technicians will begin training on the Cyclone helicopter in August.
Researchers at University of Illinois at Chicago have IQ-tested M.I.T.'s ConceptNet 4 and found it's as smart as a 4-year-old. It did well on vocabulary and recognition of similarities, but did poorly on the comprehension tests. Essentially, it had difficulty with the 'why' questions.
Although ConceptNet 4 isn't ready to run an air traffic control system, artificial intelligences will play increasingly key roles in future systems engineering solutions. Simple feedback or algorithms won't be enough to control and manage our most complicated systems. Systems engineers need to follow the development of this technology and be ready to integrate it when it is ready. In this TED Talk, Rodney Brooks explores how we will need robots to address coming demographic changes. As the number of working-age adults decline and retirees increase we're going to need robots to help us, but for this to work we need robots that can be programmed by anyone, not just highly skilled specialists. It's a challenge that all system engineers face when creating complex systems for public use.
[Image from: http://www.ted.com/talks/rodney_brooks_why_we_will_rely_on_robots.html] SpaceX is developing a vertical takeoff and landing prototype named Grasshopper. The intent is use these as booster rockets that returns to the launch pad after separation rather than burning up in the atmosphere, or falling into the ocean. The latest video shows the unmanned rocket lifting off, going up about 325m then returning to the launch pad. And if that wasn't cool enough, all the footage was taken by a remotely controlled hex-copter. [Image from SpaceX video]
There was good news yesterday as the Harper government announced a five year, $531-million contract extension to repair and upgrade Canada's submarine fleet. The contract was won by Babcock Canada Inc. and much of the work will be done at the department of national defence's Fleet Maintenance Facility in Esquimalt. (Photograph by: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HMCS_Victoria_SSK-876_near_Bangor.jpg)
In any complex system high availability and fault recovery is important. NETFLIX is pursuing a novel approach call the Simian Army which intentionally stresses a live system to increase resiliency. ACMQueue has an interesting article on it.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has an interesting article on lessons learned on the decommissioning of nuclear power plants. It points out some key aspects of large scale systems engineering that have parallels in other large projects in areas like defense, or aircraft.
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