This is a Scenario where a UAS is to be designed for precision crop-dusting but in the middle of the design process the system manufacturer found it to be overweight. The only way to reduce the weight is either by reducing the weight of the Guidance, Navigation & Control or reducing the weight of the payload delivery because the UAS will not be able to carry sufficient weight to spread the specified (Marketing has already talked this up to customers) amount of fertilizer over the specified area without cutting into the fuel margin. The safety engineers are uncomfortable with the idea of changing the fuel margin at all.So the company has decided to get your opinion as a systems engineer on what to do.
In order to be able to solve this problem you have to know what is the true definition of systems engineering. Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems by focuses on defining customer needs and documenting their requirement(INCOSE, n.d).
With this definition it is clear to see where a systems engineer suggestion will be pointing to because for any product that is developed, the most important thing a system engineer puts into consideration is the customers requirement. Here the customers requirement is having a specific amount of fertilizer spread over a specified area. Therefore it makes sense for the systems engineer to work on reducing the weight of the Guidance, Navigation & Control System (GNC) instead of the payload and by so doing satisfies the requirement of the customer.
Moreover the GNC is easier to change because they are parts that are installed after the development of the system as compared to the payload which sometimes has to be embedded into the unmanned aircraft system air frame.
Reference
INCOSE (n.d). What is Systems Engineering. Retrieved from
http://www.incose.org/AboutSE/WhatIsSE
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