Systems Engineering

ATC's systems engineering work adapts the standard principles outlined by the International Council on System Engineering to the requirements of our customers' organizations, such as those defined in the FAA's System Engineering Handbook (SEM 3.1).

Our systems engineering group has extensive experience with:

• Trade studies – A trade study is a process for making logical decisions among design alternatives, and summarizing the results in well-supported recommendations. Successful trade studies begin with a clear definition of the objective, select appropriate evaluation criteria, and perform a comprehensive search for alternatives. To avoid bias, evaluation criteria are applied in a fair, consistent manner—preferring, whenever possible, objective criteria to subjective.
  
  
• Interface engineering – Deep roots in network engineering give ATCorp engineers extensive experience with the development of interface definition documents, the evaluation of interface documents written by others, and the development of software/hardware that conforms to interface requirements.
  
  
• Risk management – ATC has performed several risk management assignments for the FAA. These include design and oversight of a risk mitigation process for the Advanced Automation System that correctly predicted a processor performance problem early in its design cycle. We also conducted a safety risk assessment for the Final Approach Runway Occupancy Signal. That assessment augmented the FAA's standard risk management approach with a custom-designed state-transition diagram depicting the system states, both valid and invalid, and the likely outcome of each. The state-transition diagram was used to assess technical risk and develop risk mitigation strategies.