ASCI 530: Research 2.5- Weeding Out a Solution

      Introduction

International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) defines systems engineering as an engineering discipline whose responsibility is creating and executing an interdisciplinary process to ensure that the customer and stakeholder's needs are satisfied in a high quality, trustworthy, cost efficient and schedule compliant manner throughout a system's entire life cycle. And the role of a systems engineer is mainly to interface between management, customers, suppliers, and specialty engineers in the systems development process (INCOSE, 2016).

                                                        Responses

Communication

As a systems engineer, it is important to establish communication between parties and convey customer’s intention clearly to various teams in order to establish common objective, which is to meet clients’ requirements stipulated in the contract. The teams must realized that failure to meet those requirements will incur penalties and put company’s reputation at stake leading to fewer business opportunities and projects in the near future. The repercussion affects job opportunities and possibility of retrenchment. When the teams realized they are on the same boat, it reduces the chances of dispute and conflict significantly. More importantly, in order to survive rough sea, the teams must work together to stay afloat.

Collection of Data & Problem Troubleshooting

            It is important for systems engineer to collect and analyze the data from various teams. The data include design tolerance, hardware and software specifications. Systems engineer also must understand the reasons causing ‘over-weight’ and its limit exceedance. More importantly, to analyze the issues from the perspective of the specialty engineers and to offer recommendations or suggestions as neutral party. Particularly for this project, can the ‘over-weight’ problems resolved by flying UAV at certain patterns covering similar surface areas, which can be programmed easily through micro-controller.

Identifying Project Objective

            The project is about precision crop-dusting. The objective is to deliver fertilizer efficiently to the crop within surface areas specified by customer. By knowing the current challenges encountered by two subsystems’ team, it is important for systems engineer to take initiative to liaise with customer by advising them there are many ways to achieve same objective. One of the solution is to deploy two or multiple UAVs in covering the same surface areas without incurring additional costs.

Conclusion

             It takes efforts to be a good systems engineer. The biggest challenge is to bring the common objective across many parties and to establish platform in order to achieve same goals by thinking out of the box. For this project, systems engineer could offset weight issue by reviewing flying patterns and profiles of UAV, which could be easily programmed through micro-controller. Alternatively, to deploy multiple UAVs to cover same surface areas.

Reference

INCOSE. (2016, Aug 21st). What is Systems Engineering? Retrieved from http://www.incose.org/AboutSE/WhatIsSE