Defining an architecture for the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge

The Body of Knowledge and Curriculum to Advance Systems Engineering (BKCASE™) project was originally sponsored by the US Department of Defense (DoD) and managed by the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC). The project produced a baseline Guide to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) and associated Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering (GRCSE). The primary aim of this project was to bound, define and document the knowledge related to Systems Engineering (SE) practice to support education, research, professional development and practice. SEBoK version 1.0 was released in 2012 providing a flexible and evolvable organization of SE knowledge and initial baseline content. Since then the BKCASE Editorial Board has continued to update SEBoK content to ensure it is current and relevant with evolving SE knowledge. Additional detail on this is available at www.BKCASE.org. This paper will discuss the development of the SEBoK architecture and how well it achieves this aim. It will outline the ongoing SEBoK update process and discuss what The Board has learnt after 3 years of SEBoK stewardship.