Competitive pressures are demanding vehicle designs that better 

satisfy customer wants and needs over the entire vehicle life cycle and, 

especially, are less expensive to build and operate. This can only be 

accomplished by understanding the translation of customer wants and 

needs to engineering requirements and then ensuring every vehicle 

produced conforms to these requirements for its entire life, even in 

the presence of a wide variety of customer usage and operational 

environment variations. The application of systems engineering 

techniques is a key success factor in accomplishing this task - higher 

quality products at lower cost. 

The course goal is to enable the student to apply key systems 

engineering tools to practical vehicle problems. The basic three- 

step systems engineering process, comparison of the two different 

systems viewpoints and key methods and tools in each of these 

domains will be presented. Student exercises, drawn from practical 

vehicle problems, will be conducted and evaluated during this class. 

Integration of the two different systems viewpoints to create a vehicle 

conceptual design that fully satisfies customer requirements for 

the entire vehicle life cycle will be illustrated. Finally, translation of 

vehicle requirements to the manufacturing domain and how systems 

engineering methods and tools enable reliable and robust design will 

be described.

Learning Objectives 

By attending this seminar, you will be able to: 

Describe the basic systems engineering three-step process and the 

important inputs and outputs of each step 

Describe the vehicle architecture viewpoint and indicate why it is 

critical to vehicle commercial success 

Describe the vehicle functional viewpoint and indicate why it is 

critical to vehicle customer satisfaction 

Create hierarchical functional diagrams 

Employ physical and functional models to create p-diagrams in 

support of ensuing FMEA as well as reliability and robustness 

engineering (Design for Six Sigma) 

List the four types of verification that can be employed to ensure