Implementation Of Systems Engineering Approaches In Academic Projects: Software Defined Radio Technology Development As A Case Study
No Thumbnail Available
Links to Files
Permanent Link
Collections
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2015
Type of Work
Department
Industrial Manufacturing and Information Engineering
Program
Doctor of Engineering
Citation of Original Publication
Rights
This item is made available by Morgan State University for personal, educational, and research purposes in accordance with Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Other uses may require permission from the copyright owner.
Abstract
Each year, federal and private agencies spend billions of dollars on research projects that they request academic institutions to accomplish for them. However, the communication language between these agencies as clients and academia as the hosts is not yet well-established. This has resulted in lack of clarity in description of what exactly the clients need and in description of host's capabilities and challenges. In addition, many of these projects are essentially interdisciplinary and demand involvement of diverse research teams from various university departments. Lack of cohesive collaboration among the diverse teams results in mismatches between different compartments of project output and, consequently, a generation of superfluous product prototypes. Finally, for their real-time tracking and later convenient retrieval, the current situation of documentation of academic projects needs to be significantly altered. We suggest that the presence of a systems engineering team should be an indispensable part of every large academic project, in order to monitor and manage the various aspects and phases from initiation to completion. For this purpose, we proposed a systems engineering method specific for academic research projects that considers both strengths and challenges of universities as host research institutions. As a case study, we applied this proposed systems engineering approach on a NASA-funded project at Morgan State University (MSU) which was about design and implementation of Software Defined Radio (SDR) for space exploration. Application of this method significantly improved the professional dialogue and technical clarifications between NASA and MSU partners, as well as improved the technical clarifications within MSU technical teams. Moreover, sub-system compatibility among different modules of the implemented product was notably increased. Overall, application of systems engineering approaches in academic projects result in mutual benefits for both federal or private clients and the universities.