Context-based Systems Engineering

This paper presents an approach to systems engineering and system-of-systems modeling that is based on the idea of context modeling. Based on over ten years of research and application the approach forms the basis of ACSE (Atego Context-based Systems Engineering). Many traditional approaches to systems modeling represent systems as high-level blocks and then show subsystems using aggregation and composition; providing a representation of a system as a structured hierarchy. This paper suggests that this structure-based approach is unrealistic and unreliable and proposes a context-based approach to systems modeling. Contexts represent systems from particular stakeholder´s points of view; it is suggested that a combination of these contexts are used as a basis for systems modeling and, hence, understanding. Following this it is suggested that system of systems can be represented in this way, by defining higher-level contexts. This is illustrated thought a simple example demonstrating the principle of context-based system engineering.