Quantitative Methods in Systems Engineering is a four-week online course that will provide you with quantitative tools and techniques to explore the analysis, design, and decision-making process of developing complex systems.
The course reinforces the use of quantitative tools to analyze model-based systems architecture and teaches how to quantitatively explore design spaces to produce a series of designs based on common architecture. You will learn to explore design alternatives to ensure that you actively choose the best possible architecture for your systems.
The course is well-suited for engineers and other professionals in the aerospace, automotive, defense, consumer appliances, manufacturing, and related industries; as well as systems engineering professionals, directors, or senior managers looking to innovate and optimize their operational, manufacturing, and design systems.
The courseware features video lectures, real-world case studies, interactive projects, and optional group work, and includes ungraded practice activities throughout to provide opportunities for learners to check their understanding. Forward-thinking Action Plans provide a framework for learners to apply course concepts to their specific fields.
You will focus on implementing early-lifecycle analysis and decision methods in order to understand how different design choices affect complex systems. You will also learn methods for the recombination of existing design options to produce new alternatives by interpreting the results of trade space studies. Instructor- and TA-lead webinars provide a forum both for learners to pose course-related questions to experts and for the experts to draw upon their own experience of today’s systems engineering challenges and solutions.
The first weeks of the course will focus on understanding early tradeoff decisions and value-oriented decision-making in systems engineering. Learners will explore how to frame early decisions, different selection concept methods, and developing and operationalizing value models for decision-making.
The middle weeks will focus on generating and evaluating design alternatives. You will perform tradeoff analysis on a system of your choice—first, a simple tradeoff study, followed by more complex analysis. You will gather data, identify alternatives, perform analysis, and make recommendations for your system, and develop a robust tradespace via dynamic Excel sheets for modeling.
The final weeks will focus on tradespace exploration and analysis. You will learn to identify key features and patterns and determine sensitivity and robustness of design spaces. You will also pull back to contextualize how humans, methods, and models interact within the systems engineering space.
The course will train you to become conversant in cost, value, and performance models as they relate to model-based systems engineering. You will be able to advocate for the benefits of and explore the challenges of producing a series of designs. You will be able to design frameworks for thinking through complex systems and justifying decisions at each step of the process.
For more information, please visit the following resources:
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