SYSEN 6400 - Theory and Practice of Systems Architecture

Spring. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

Enrollment limited to: PhD students. Co-meets with MAE 5950/SYSEN 5400.

H. Gao.

Every system has an architecture (its essence, or DNA), i.e., a high-level abstraction of its design that provides a unifying concept for detailed design and commits most of the system’s performance and lifecycle cost. This course presents the frameworks, methods, and tools required to analyze and synthesize system architectures. The course has a theory part that emphasizes synergies between humans and computers in the architecture process, and a practical part based on a long project and guest lectures by real system architects. The theory part covers topics such as architecture views, layers and projections, stakeholder networks, dealing with fuzziness, automatic concept generation, architecture space exploration, patterns and styles, heuristics, and knowledge engineering. The practice part focuses on special topics such as commonality, platforming, reuse, upstream and downstream influences, and software architecture.