ABSTRACT
This outline has gone through several different versions since it was first developed as a tool to support the design of a particular system, the Mine, which we have encountered already. That version was really an expanded life cycle costing model that increased its level of detail as the project went from feasibility to detailed design, and it was built in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, as discussed in The Changing Nature of Engineering.1 The idea of turning it into a tool for a variety of projects by making it a system of elements that could be combined in different ways and to which new elements could be added at any time was developed on and
off over a number of years, and presented in various fora, for example, at the 4th International Symposium of the National Council of Systems Engineering.2 This development resulted in a version programmed in Microsoft Visual Basic 6, with each element a separate form. However, this turned out not to be very practical; the framework within which a model for a particular project could be constructed was too rigid. It did not allow each element to be used to explore that particular aspect of the system in isolation, and the elements could not be easily modified by the user. The regular version was a compiled version, so no changes beyond changes to the parameters already included in the model were possible, and changing the source code version required a reasonable proficiency in VB programming.
