A Standard-based adaptive path to teach systems engineering: 15288 and 29110 standards use cases

This paper discusses the use of two different standards for teaching Systems Engineering (SE): ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 and ISO/IEC 29110. The first one is a general and widely- used standard describing the lifecycle processes of the entire system, whereas the second one is a relatively new standard based on a reduced set of standards elements focused on lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs). We are especially interested in the impact that SE standards can have on teaching this discipline to engineering students. We consider the teaching of fundamental principles of systems engineering. In this paper we illustrate how our, previously developed, standard based solution for systems engineering education can be used as a framework to support these standard-based teaching paths. We mainly focus on illustrating how adapting standard processes can be done, considering not only the learning goals, but also projects size and complexity, in a project-based learning environment.
This paper shows that, thanks to it’s adaptation from the ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288, and to it’s reduced size, the ISO/IEC 29110 standard is particularly suitable for teaching systems engineering fundamental knowledge to undergraduate students, new to the discipline. While the ISO IEC/IEEE 15288 might be more suited for students that already have a good grounding in systems engineering fundamentals, especially thanks to the ability to use some from its various processes to separately teach different topics of systems engineering.