Systems Engineering

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how complex engineering projects should be designed and managed over the life cycle of the project. Issues such as logistics, the coordination of different teams, and automatic control of machinery become more difficult when dealing with large, complex projects. Systems engineering deals with work-processes and tools to handle such projects, and it overlaps with both technical and human-centered disciplines such as control engineering, industrial engineering, organizational studies, and project management.

The GVCS qualifies as a "complex engineering project", and can therefore benefit from applying this engineering discipline/specialty.

Systems Engineering Tools

• Input/Output Model - This can be visualized as a spreadsheet with various machines in the GVCS as columns, and inputs and outputs as rows. Each machine requires inputs such as steel, lubricants, assembly labor, fuel, etc. It also produces some kind of output. The purpose of a model is to see if your system as a whole has closure and balance. In other words, are all the inputs matched by outputs? Are there missing machine types identified by missing inputs? Is the size or quantity of a particular machine in the kit the correct size/productivity? Will the system as a whole produce a surplus, and if so how much? These are really all questions of accounting. Rather than counting everything in money, this type of spreadsheet does the accounting of each type of input/output/resource/supply separately as categories. Note that human labor for assembly, maintenance, and operation is one of the input types.