Chapter 4: Life Cycles
This chapter introduces the key concept of the life cycle and its relationship to systems engineering. Understanding and managing life cycles is crucial to the success of any systems engineering initiative.
The concept of a life cycle is relatively simple; however, there is a lot of hidden complexity associated with life cycles and, as a consequence, a lot of ambiguity and misunderstanding in this area. There are two main areas of misunderstanding – the types of life cycle and the interactions between life cycles, both of which will be discussed in this chapter.
In this chapter, we will study the following topics:
- Defining the main concepts associated with life cycles: The chapter begins by defining the main concepts associated with life cycles by expanding the MBSE ontology that has been developed so far in this book.
- Discussing the different types of life cycles that may exist, along with examples: The different types of life cycles...
