Systems Engineering Efforts - What, When and How Much?

This paper describes the electrical system development for the headlight feature in an International High Performance Vehicle. Systems engineers developed several iterations of functional requirements, functional block diagrams, state diagrams, and body controller software requirements early in the development cycle at considerable engineering expense. The hardware design team found the functional block diagrams useful, however the software design team did not find the other artifacts useful. The software design teams chose to implement a design that was very similar to a current product offering and did not map to the system proposed by the systems engineering team. This paper provides examples of the Systems Engineering artifacts and shows when they were developed in the project timeline.