Systems Engineering: Part 1

Requirements Analysis

I've been doing some preliminary work on the Firefighting Robot. In hopes of making it easier to tackle the problem, I'm applying my ongoing education in Systems Engineering (SE) to decompose and methodically solve this complex problem in a short time by applying an SE-like process methodology.

I've started with the first SE step by extracting requirements from the competition rules. Requirements should describe what a system should do, not how it should do it. They should be solution independent. Decompose the problem first, solve it piece by piece later. Next, I added requirements to better define the problem to be solved. I'll continue to refine these as I go. Here's an initial requirements draft: FirefightingRequirements.rtf (If I could afford it, I'd use Vitech's CORE for SE work, but c'est la vie)

Next: Part 2: Functional Analysis and Allocation