Documenting Complex Systems in the Enterprise

Carlos Troche
MITRE Corporation

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     Last modified: July 27, 2006

Abstract
Documenting how complex systems informs systems engineering should be done in a systematic, repeatable form that is widely recognized and accessible to an audience of systems engineers, analysts and managers. While research is on-going in complexity, it is important to find ways of communicating, visualizing this information in practical ways that can enable its use and further development. MITRE supported the DOD in adopting and adapting a set of modeling practices – named architectures - that can serve the need of informing systems engineering about complexity and its effects. This paper will introduce architectures, a tool to show the whole, its parts and their interrelationships. It will discuss why is it important to deal with this area now, how they assist in the translation of complexity, how well they have (and haven’t) been accepted, and how some of the organizations in the DOD are using them.