Systems Engineering

At a time when the Minuteman Missile program was employed as deterrent protection from foreign nuclear attack, missile designers were also directly involved in management of the design effort. Project management supported the engineering effort in terms of budget, facilities, employment, and delegation of design responsibility and authority.

It came as a surprise that the first missile design necessitated immense cost to maintain the missile for launch on command. A redesign was initiated, with the design engineers now taking on the task of finding less costly ways to test, and when problems occurred, less costly ways to repair and maintain. At the same time, hazardous conditions were given sufficient attention for comprehensive analysis, to add detection, reporting, and design features to fail safe. The formalization of this redesign into an engineering methodology made for the creation of “Systems Engineering.” 

This engineering specialty evolved into an audit process employed by the DoD to assure that R&D contracts generally produced the needed system that embodied sufficient Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety to justify the project price tag. There are other stories presenting various definitions of systems and systems engineering found online: Systems and System Engineering

A fundamental premise with “better energy LLC” is that engineers engaged in solving energy improvement challenges always reserve design authority and management responsibility, and in doing so provide assurance that energy decisions are framed with full STEM justification.

Software engineering has begun to pursue a comparable process to deal with the need for product safety. Safe Software

Better Energy LLC endeavors to make available as open source information any findings from employing SE for climate solutions, including analysis and design, to identify near-term renewable energy solutions that are economically sustainable while still more beneficial to the natural environment than those now established as infrastructure. Participation from SE  practitioners to achieve such solutions is strongly invited.  Effective solutions necessarily require economic leverage in combination with mastery of core technology, a skillset which is unique to the SE community.

Sustainable and workable climate solutions require the strong nexus of sociology and hard sciences in the form of sound economics and fully-precedented Systems Engineering.  Its time to grow this mix for real.