A platform-centric functional hierarchy

Systems engineering and the engineering of computer-based systems, involves understanding the application functions involved in the system solution, understanding the overall interaction of these functions, properly allocating these functions to the human, hardware, and software components of the system, and ensuring the system solution accomplishes its intended mission. Several hierarchical layers of abstraction exist for application functions. In order to understand the implementation and interaction of the application functions, each of these conceptual layers must be defined and the system's roles and interactions within these layers understood. This paper defines a generic set of hierarchical layers for application abstraction designated the platform-centric functional hierarchy. Layers of abstractions are defined which go below and above the platform layer, into the details of the onboard and offboard resources, respectively.