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Most of the history of systems engineering has been focused on processes for engineering a single complex system. However, most large enterprises design, manufacture, operate, sell, or support not one product but multiple product lines of related but varying systems. They seek to optimize time to market, costs of development and production, leverage of intellectual assets, best use of talented human resources, overall competitiveness, overall profitability and productivity. Optimizing globally across multiple product lines does not follow from treating each system family member as an independently engineered system or product. Traditional systems engineering principles can be generalized to apply to families. This article includes a multi-year case study of the actual use of a generic model-based systems engineering methodology for families, Systematica™, across the embedded electronic systems products of one of the world's largest manufacturers of heavy equipment.

Engineering complex systems is challenged by problems of language, increasingly as systems become more complex. Prominent are (1) integration of subsystems using communication networks, and (2) integration of work of engineers, product planners, suppliers, and customers. Both “hard engineering” and “soft process” cases encounter some of the same language problems in different settings. This paper briefly notes aspects of the structure of language and meaning and how they relate to these system engineering contexts. A practical, model-based technique, the Protocol Information Model (PIM), is described, to integrate both “hard” engineered systems and “soft” work processes which use “shared communication channels”.

System engineering is partly concerned with systemic properties of engineered products. Process improvement concerns have shifted attention toward system engineering's process artifacts, road maps, and metrics. This laudable emphasis aims for process improvement, hopefully still connected with obtaining good systems. However, it risks decline in relative attention to system properties of the engineered product. This paper returns to characteristics separating system thinking from other aspects of engineering, and makes explicit those structures often left to intuition. This leads to a specific approach, class and containment hierarchy based meta-architecture, which can explicate and retool the art-even if as process improvement.