Inherent discipline required in large system change

Recent electrical architectures of land vehicles have shown a marked increase in networking and integration of electronic controls into traditionally electro-mechanical devices, which results in complex functional interactions throughout the electrical system. This trend often drives a large system change that modifies the engineering roles of the component level engineer and also creates a need for an evolution to a vehicle level systems engineering approach. In this paper, a claim was put forth that without a certain level of inherent discipline in place and functional, no successful large system change can occur. Inherent discipline was decomposed into three parts: process, personal, and organizational disciplines. Each of these was described and relationships between them were investigated. The correlation between parenting and organizational discipline was explored. A case for the business value of inherent discipline was made by examining two examples; one of organizational progress and one of manufacturing progress. Then a case study of an emerging large system change, feature ownership, was presented. Details on the engineering roles required for feature based development at each of the hierarchical levels of the electrical system were presented.

Department dc:contributor.department

System Design and Management Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Rivard, Robin L

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Janice A. Klein.

• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35103

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35103