Systems Engineering is essential for the success of projects, especially the more complex ones, which include different professional disciplines and whose partners and working groups are often geographically distributed.
The success of every project in terms of both, the performance specifications and the schedule and budget fulfillment, strongly depends on a good organization. One of the bases of this organization is the definition and the implementation of a Systems Engineering Plan. The Systems Engineering is the interdisciplinary effort that governs the global technical effort done in the project framework to transform the initial requirements into a final system.
A Systems Engineering Plan has to describe the approach, techniques, tools, organization and plan of the technical effort needed to reach the project goals. The Systems Engineering Plan functions include:
The Reliability, Availability, Maintenance and Safety Plan, RAMS, includes all the considerations to take into account in the different project phases, to fulfill the requirements of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety.
The ILS (Integrated Logistic Support) includes the distribution of reliability and availability requirements among the different subsystems; the definition and development of the analysis to evaluate the requirements fulfillment and the execution of the actions to assure the reliability and availability requirements (e.g. component selections, redundant decisions, etc). These analyses include:
In parallel to the Systems Engineering Plan, a project has to define from the beginning the basis of the Operation and Maintenance Plan, which has to include the following aspects:
From this Plan, the Systems Engineering will distribute requirements and restrictions to each subsystem that will have to be taken into account during the design.
The project has to include a Safety Program and to track its fulfillment through all the project phases. This plan has to control the risks associated to both, the design and the final use of the system. This safety plan will include the safety policy and the risk levels definitions. The plan will also include the necessary analysis to study the safety of people, the facility and the equipments. The results of these analyses will provide an input for the design and for the final use.