Towards a systems engineering approach to turnkey rail projects

摘要

In an IEEE trial-use standard (1), "systems engineering" has been defined as,rn1. "an interdisciplinary collaborative approach to derive, evolve and verify a life-cycle-balanced system solution that satisfies customer expectations and meets public acceptability".rnA "customer" is any stakeholder: purchaser, supplier, passenger or anybody affected by the system. Their expectations for the system and their definitions of acceptability differ greatly.rnSystem Engineering (SE) unites specialists from different fields to design a product and its supporting processes of manufacture, construction, test, support and disposal, thereby satisfying traceable financial, service, legal, safety and other criteria. Although the objective of creating performing systems and the associated measurement criteria are not new, systems engineering is gaining recognition as an efficient means of achieving success while avoiding the costly problems which have often marred past projects.rnLarge scale railway projects, such as new lines and route modernisation, are increasingly being undertaken by turnkey contractors instead of state bodies. The performance of some recent projects has been unsatisfactory, leading contractors to investigate formalised systems engineering as one means of achieving substantial improvements. The authors review developments within Adtranz in the application of SE to complex interdisciplinary rail tenders and projects with the aim of reducing lead times, re-work and costs. They highlight the importance of both interface management and configuration management throughout the system delivery process and they discuss the "life cycle processes" which produce and support it.