ABSTRACT
Systems engineering is concerned with designing complex systems in an efficient and economic manner. No matter what types of systems are being developed, resources nevertheless have to be consumed; these resources could be human power, capital funds, raw materials, or working hours, to name a few. All resources are limited; as system engineers, we need to obtain the best value from these limited resources, or optimize their utilization. Systems engineering needs to incorporate optimization to achieve the design objectives. As a matter of fact, systems engineers carry out optimization on an almost daily basis; for example, we can think of decision making as a kind of optimization, as we need to pick the best alternatives to achieve the optimum outcome. The optimization methods and models we review in this chapter are more general, and these methods and models originate from operations research.
