Activities for the Handoff to Downstream Engineering

At a high level, creating the logical system architecture includes the identification of subsystems as types (blocks), connecting them up (the connected architecture), allocating requirements and system features to the subsystems, and specifying the logical interfaces between the architectural elements. Although the subsystems are “physical,” the services and flows defined in the interfaces are almost entirely logical and do not have the physical realization detail necessary for the subsystem teams. One of the key activities in the handoff workflows will be to add this level of detail so that the resulting subsystem implementations created by different subsystem teams can physically connect to one another.

For this reason, the architectural specifications must now be elaborated to include physical realization detail. For example, a logical interface service between a RADAR and a targeting system might be modeled as an...