Summary

In this chapter, the fundamental issue of design has been discussed. Design involves providing the solution to a specific problem that is specified by given needs. Design may be applied at two broad levels, which are generally referred to as the architectural design level and the detailed design level. It was discussed that architectural design is generally more abstract and applies at a high level, such as the system and subsystem level. Detailed design, on the other hand, focuses more on detailed aspects of the overall solution and focuses on the structure of subsystems, assemblies, and components.

It was also discussed that the system elements that we saw previously in Chapter 3, Systems and Interfaces, actually may take on different types. In the example ontology in this chapter, these types were logical, functional, and physical. It was seen that functional system elements satisfy logical system elements, whereas physical system elements realize functional system elements...