《Theories and Methods of Systems Engineering》is a course designed to help students learn to think like systems engineers. Students seeking to learn systems engineering after mastering a traditional engineering discipline often find the subject highly abstract and ambiguous. To help make systems engineering more tangible and easier to grasp, the book provides several models: (1) a hierarchical model of complex systems, showing them to be composed of a set of commonly occurring building blocks or components; (2) a system life cycle model derived from existing models but more explicitly related to evolving engineering activities and participants; (3) a model of the steps in the systems engineering method and their iterative application to each phase of the life cycle; (4) a concept of “ materialization ” that represents the stepwise evolution of an abstract concept to an engineered, integrated, and validated system; and (5) repeated references to the specific responsibilities of systems engineers as they evolve during the system life cycle and to the scope of what a systems engineer must know to perform these effectively.