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Engineering Systems Integration
was required. This  program is a prime example of the failure of iterative
integration. The U.S. Army indicated that the Future Combat Systems was
the “greatest technology and integration challenge it has ever undertaken”
(GAO 2007). The management challenge was stated as “. . . reducing integration risk and demonstrating product design prior to the design readiness
review . . . .” One of the particularly difficult issues for integration was the
inclusion of “. . . adapting the [new] technologies to space, weight, and
power demands of their intended environment” (GAO 2007). The term
“adapting” is not an integration task, it is a development task. The consequence of including development activities in integration work simply compounds an already difficult job. The Future Combat System program was
canceled in 2009.
Patterns in Systems Engineering and Patterns
in Systems Integration
A clear demarcation should be drawn between development (systems engineering) and integration work (systems integration). The clear distinction is
determinable through the patterns of activity and how those patterns are
used. A pattern conveys the key aspects of design (Hennig and Cloutier
2011). Patterns can be used to facilitate the reuse of proven design knowledge
(Gordijn 2002). A pattern is a test to determine if an object meets certain criteria, with the results of a test having meaning within the context of the test
and of the object; as such, the existence of a pattern indicates either potential
behavior (an increase in certainty) or to discounting previously hypothesized
behavior (which is an increase in uncertainty) (Hollywood et al. 2004).
Patterns are not just there, but rather can be created by (1) establishing a perspective from which to observe, (2) setting a set of contexts or circumstances
that prescribe the boundaries and boundary conditions, (3) stipulating a set
of independent and dependent variables that can be traced through causal
factors, (4) specifying the constraints under which the event is to occur, and
(5) advising as to how the measurement(s) should be accomplished. These
five factors are called the “duties” of a pattern. Patterns are held in high
regard as something that portends future event(s) or means something else
that is either relative or deterministic. Patterns may have meaning that only
applies to that which is at hand as these are restricted by their duties. It is the
nature of establishing the duties, as it is the nature of looking for patterns
that a single important factor in recognizing patterns is the experiences of
the observers—the greater the number of experiences, the more accurate
and intuitive the detection and interpretation of patterns. The intuitive
quality arises when patterns are improved by testing them against our
experiences (Alexander 1979). When engineers (and systems engineers)