2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Research has shown that system architecture has the greatest effect on an engineered system, with 70% of a system’s cost and capabilities being directly attributed to how the system was architected, as well as how the requirements derivation from the customer’s top-level conceptual system requirements were further derived and decomposed as part of the architecture synthesis process. Quite simply, system architecture is the bridge between the customer’s “problem space” to the system vendor’s “solution space.” The question then becomes, given that system architecture is so critically important to the success of an engineered system, why is system architecture not taught in an undergraduate education? Some would posit that system architecture does not lend itself to teaching because of its abstract nature requiring synthesis to derive a proper architecture, or because human practitioners are unable to grasp the complexity of modern systems, and therefore a “natural reductionist” approach is taken. However, there have been several successful initiatives which have introduced system thinking, a core element of system architecting, into undergraduate educations. Basic forms of system thinking such as abstraction/holistic thinking, option generation, conceptual design, stakeholder identification, functional decomposition, and use of heuristics have been introduced into existing curriculum. More advanced system thinking concepts such as system dynamics and the use of causal loop diagrams, stock and flow diagrams, as well as root causal analysis have also been successfully implemented into many undergraduate systems/industrial engineering programs. These undergraduate system thinking skills provide the foundation to expand upon and provide undergraduate engineers with an understanding of system architecture. The focus should be on the key system architecture learning objectives of: the importance of system architecture in creating effective systems, how outputs of system architecture seed system development, how the architecture is transdisciplinary and considers the system lifecycle, and how the architecture bridges the vendor’s “solution space” to the customer’s “problem space.” The proposed approach is to expand on existing course material in all undergraduate engineering classes that currently introduce system architecture (typically while discussing the systems "Vee" process Model), to include the stated learning objectives. An implemented example of this proposed approach will be described herein.

Note: If internally approved, a surveyed assessment of system architecture learning from a sophomore Fundamentals of System Engineering course will be included in this paper.