How Are Large Complex Systems, Such as ISS and LHC, Created and Managed?
How do space agencies create and manage large missions like the ISS and the Space Shuttle, which employ thousands of engineers? How do the different sub-systems of these large projects interact and interface? What are the industry-standard tools for system engineering?
Last night, our Space Cadets learned a lot about this, as Prof. Alessandro Golkar of Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology visited and gave a fascinating live lecture on System Architecture in front of a packed New Conference Hall at Sofia University. This little known, almost philosophical discipline is at the heart of every Space mission, and is used to create and manage large infrastructure projects worldwide, such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He explained about how the different parts of a system are put together, and what the general properties of any system are, such as ‘emergence’, ‘complexity’, and ‘architecture’.
Prof. Golkar gave advice on how to decompose complex systems into parts, elements, and hierarchies, in order to get make them manageable and reduce their complexity. He outlined the systems thinking approach to developing technological products from engineering to the market, and stressed the need to take into account the technological, economic, and policy requirements, in order to achieve success. He illustrated all these principles by applying them to some of the Space Challenges 2014 projects – the robotic Rover and Glider systems, which the Space Cadets are building. After this mind-opening talk there was a Q&A session, with many questions coming from the Space Challenges participants.
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function wpsocialite_markup() in /home/customer/www/spaceedu.net/public_html/wp-content/themes/space-theme-child/single.php:30 Stack trace: #0 /home/customer/www/spaceedu.net/public_html/wp-includes/template-loader.php(106): include() #1 /home/customer/www/spaceedu.net/public_html/wp-blog-header.php(19): require_once('/home/customer/...') #2 /home/customer/www/spaceedu.net/public_html/index.php(17): require('/home/customer/...') #3 {main} thrown in /home/customer/www/spaceedu.net/public_html/wp-content/themes/space-theme-child/single.php on line 30