Objective: Aerospace systems are becoming increasingly complex. In this class, you will learn the basic principles of aerospace system engineering. Given that this is a 6-unit class, this introduction will necessarily be cursory and provide a general overview, rather than an in-depth treatment. Skillful and experienced system engineers acquire their craft over the course of many years by participating in and leading projects. Therefore, this class should be considered merely a "door opener" to the world of systems engineering. Unfortunately, despite being around for 50+ years, the current state of knowledge and recommended practices in systems engineering are far from perfect. If they were, we would not witness cost and schedule overruns in many aerospace projects (such as the recent Boeing 787 Dreamliner) and major accidents and losses. As the performance and goals of these systems has increased, so has the challenge of designing and managing them. In other words, systems engineering is evolving and we are still grappling with significant challenges. While the standards lay out a nice disciplined development process, they also tend to be behind the state of the art and what is required for successful system creation. The class will include both the classic approaches as well as the new emerging methods to replace the old bureaucratic approach that tends to minimize certain aspects such as the role of humans in systems and the ever increasing role of software and digital systems. A new kind of systems engineering is emerging based on systems theory and we at MIT are at the forefront of it.
Required Background: There are no prerequisites and no required background. Having some system engineering project experience will be helpful. What you get out of the class will be a function of what you bring to it along with your personal goals and objectives. Each student may find they get different things out of the experience.
Reading: Instead of a textbook, required reading will consist of a carefully selected set of historically important and foundational papers as well as more current ones reflecting the latest thoughts. Some papers will be technical while others will be opinions or essays. The literature is vast, and papers have been selected for their historical relevance in the development of the field or for their ability to help you critique the assumptions underlying current software/system engineering dogma. There will also be readings in the most important standards in order to learn the classic approach.
Assignments: Because my goal is to enhance your ability to make successful professional judgments rather than use a specific set of tools or a particular approach to engineering software, most weeks there will be assignments that involve evaluation and interpretation rather than practice in applying particular techniques or tools.
There will be two types of assignments: Except for the first week, you will be required to submit a short (one half to one page) summary of each paper assigned for that week (although not the readings from the standards) along with a critique of the paper (see instructions below) and occasionally answers to a few specific questions on that topic or paper. Because class sessions will involve a lot of discussion of the readings, late summaries will not be accepted.
There will be no exams. The summaries assigned for the last week will involve synthesizing what you have learned in the class.
Class Sessions: Class meetings will include a mixture of lecture and discussion. You will find that most concepts are easily learned from the readings and do not require my explaining them to you. A few topics are difficult to learn on your own or I could not find any good tutorial papers on them so they will be described in class. You will get the most out of the class if you participate in the class discussions.
Grading: Grades will be based on the weekly assignments and on class participation.
Schedule: The topic is vast and cannot be completely covered in one semester. The specific topics to be covered have been chosen somewhat arbitrarily and may change in future offerings of the class. A schedule and list of assigned readings are available on the class web page. Copies of the class lecture notes are also available for download there.
Instructions for Reading Assigments: Before each class session, for the papers that are not marked as "reading only," you will submit a short (one half to one page) summary of each paper assigned for the week that includes a description of the major ideas and themes. In addition, if you are asked to provide a critique, you should provide short answers to the following general questions:
Because it obviously will not be possible to read the papers for the first class by the first class meeting (as they were not available), you will not be required to submit anything on the first week's readings.
In addition, there may be some short assignments during the semester that will be posted and described in class.