Maps or Itineraries? A Systems Engineering Insight from Ancient Navigators

Processes and procedures are the heart of current descriptions of systems engineering. The “vee diagram,” ISO 15288, the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook, and enterprise-specific business process models focus attention on process and procedure. However, there is a non-procedural way to view systems engineering. This approach is to describe the configuration space “navigated” by systems engineering, and what is meant by system trajectories in that space, traveled during system life cycles. This sounds abstract because we have lacked explicit maps necessary to describe this configuration space. We understand concrete steps of a procedure, so we focus there. But where do these steps take us? And what does “where” mean in this context? Clues are found in recent discoveries about ancient navigation, as well as later development of mathematics and physics. This paper, part I of a case for stronger model-based systems engineering (MBSE) semantics, focuses on the underlying configuration space inherent to systems.