Systems Design in The Emerging Digital Age

The landscape of engineering systems design has been changing in the context of recent pervasive digitalization trend and the fast development of smart cyber-physical systems or smart connected systems powered by Internet of Things. Many traditional products no longer stand alone, and they are becoming smart devices and connected with others in networks. As a result, the service quality, availability, reliability, safety, and security of those connected systems will impact each other. But more importantly, the connectivity offers opportunities for those systems to provide intelligent services, leads to synergy from the connected systems, and triggers innovative applications and business models (Huang, 2017; Huang et al., 2016; Khaitan and McCalley, 2015; Porter and Heppelmann, 2015). The increasing complexity of systems operational environment and profound impacts make systems design in the digital age become much more complex and challenging. Systems design, in a broader sense, aims to satisfy the needs and requirements of stakeholders and the operational concept (OpsCon) by defining system requirements, creating and specifying alternatives of logical architecture, physical architecture and interfaces, analysing and selecting optimal architecture(s), and creating and specifying engineering details for realizing the selected architecture(s). The concepts, principles, methodology, models and methods of systems design have been evolving for decades (Abran et al., 2004; BKCASE Editorial Board, 2017; Blanchard and Fabrycky, 2010; Buede and Miller, 2016; INCOSE, 2015; Simon, 1996, 1988, 1969; White, 1998). The evolution of the discipline is based on the practice of many specific fields of engineering systems design, such as software engineering (Boehm, 1988, 1981; INCOSE, 2015; Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Martin, 2001), control system (Johnson, 1989; Noura et al., 2009; Tanaka and Wang, 2004), embedded systems (Henzinger and Sifakis, 2007; Kopetz, 2011), manufacturing systems (Wu, 2012), and many others. As discussed earlier, in the new landscape of smart connected operational environment, the complex interactions and their impacts between the system in design and external systems in the operational environment pose many challenges to engineering systems design. Among those challenges, security is perhaps the most significant and widely concerned issue (Humayed et al., 2017; Sadeghi et al., 2015); beyond technologies, human users frequently become the cause of security incidents, thus being a critical factor to the cybersecurity of an organization and associated digital systems. More generally, human factors have become an important consideration of systems design (Nemeth, 2004; Stanton et al., 2017; Woodson et al., 1992). Moreover, the introduction of digital systems,