Measures and approach for modemization of existing systems

Due to accelerating technological progress any engineered system eventually becomes obsolete and the question arises as to its modernization. Disciplines such as change and configuration management propose methods to maintain system at operational level by incorporating relatively small changes. When major rebuild is required to the system, existing literature proposes to follow the same System Engineering processes as during new system design and development. Systems Engineering, traditionally focused on design and development of new systems, paying limited attention to modernization of existing ones and its processes need to be specially tailored to the modernization of existing system. In the case of straightforward application of Systems Engineering processes, the step of new system formulation is often neglected and considered as something already granted. This paper gives an overview of approaches and methods in the field of system modernization. It proposes a metrics for classification of different types of system modernization. To facilitate system modernization this work introduces a framework based on proposed metrics, Design Structure Matrixes and functional analysis. The framework consists of decomposition and synthesis phases and aims to define new (modified) system, by providing a set of alternatives. The proposed framework anticipates application of traditional System Engineering approach. The paper is illustrated with an example in the field of car retrofitting.