BASELINE
Systems Engineering Glossary
Systems Engineering — Systems Engineering — Configuration Management — Baseline
Information on Baseline
A baseline is a complete description of the configuration
of a system at a particular point in its development.
Baselines are therefore form the basis for configuration management. While
the baseline description will vary in each stage of
the system lifecycle, all baselines serve the same principal purpose
in guiding the design and development process. Baselines in systems
design are like way points in navigation. In navigation we
do not take a bearing to our final destination and
simply head off in that direction because, for the same
angular error in our bearing, the error in our arrival
point increases with distance away from our start point. Consequently,
we take a short bearing to a known feature, travel
to that feature, convince ourselves that we are at the
correct point and then take another short bearing to another
way point, and so on. In systems engineering, therefore, baselines
serve as way points that guide our design so that,
at any point in our design, we are not looking
all the way back to the start point (most probably
the user need statement), but are rather only looking back
to the last confirmed baseline.
Baselines also allow us to
recover more easily from any errors we make along the
way, because we can simply return to the last confirmed
baseline and trace our design from there, rather than
trace all the way back to the start point. Baselines
are also very useful in systems engineering when we change
design teams. At a lower level, the current design team
needs only to refer back to the last baseline.
In
systems engineering, there are normally considered to be three major
baselines in a system lifecycle: the Functional Baseline at
the end of Conceptual Design, the Allocated Baseline at
the end of Preliminary Design, and the Product Baseline
at the end of Detailed Design & Development. These three
baselines are the way points in our configuration management system.
Other topics in our resources on Systems Engineering related to Baseline include:
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