ANSI/IEEE 1471 and systems engineering

ANSI/IEEE Standard 1471-2000 is the Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems, developed by the IEEE's Architecture Working Group (AWG) under the sponsorship of the Software Engineering Standards Committee of IEEE. ANSI/IEEE 1471-2000 is the first formal standard to address the content and organization of architectural descriptions. [A wide variety of architecture frameworks exist as de facto standards in particular communities, but ANSI/IEEE 1471 is the first formal standard in the sense of being a product formally approved by a recognized standards body.] The standard defines the structure and content of an Architectural Description (AD) and incorporates a broad consensus on best practices for such descriptions. Although ANSI/IEEE 1471-2000 was conceived as a software-focused standard, this article argues that it is equally applicable to any system; hence appropriate for use as a part of systems engineering to describe system architectures. This article reviews the concepts of ANSI/IEEE 1471-2000, the rationale for their selection, and demonstrates its application in systems engineering. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 7: 257–270, 2004