I have been studying and working on this topic since 2002. I was first introduced to the concept of patterns some friends that were software engineers working on a large defense program. Our goal was to use software design patterns to improve software quality by using consistent designs in UML, and thereby, consistent implementations across many of the different subsystems. Even our complex UML diagrams representing our software architecture began to take on recognizable attributes across the different subsystems.
Most people in the software pattern community attribute Christopher Alexander as the first to formalize and articulate the concept and value of patterns. Throughout the 60's and 70's Alexander, a civil architect, worked to improve on the art of urban design by discovering and documenting patterns that other architects could use.
It began to dawn on me that the concept could be abstracted to the systems engineering level, whereby systems with common goals may have common architectural attributes captured in a UML model and that those commonalities could be captured and documented as patterns. Since then, there have been a number of articles appearing in professional journals, and conference papers and presentations discussing complex patterns for systems engineering. This blog has been created to support this growing body of systems engineers interested in the topic.
I am interested in your thoughts and experiences mining and using patterns in systems engineering. Welcome to the discussion.
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