System Life Cycle

ISO/IEC TR 24748-1 and INCOSE identify six generic life cycle stages for a system, illustrated in the following model:

In the transportation environment, "production" typically alludes to construction activities, which are more monolothic than the build cycle for a product. We also tend to pay less attention to retirement or salvage activities. Consequently, when we consider the life cycle for the ITS environment we typically consider something more cyclical:

ARC-IT addresses stakeholder concerns related mostly to development, operations and maintenance activities, which exist to different degrees in these blocks. Consequently, we break out operations and maintenance more like the INCOSE/ISO diagram.

Most of the functional, physical and communications views focus on operations, though several service packages surround maintenance activities and so there are supporting artifacts that are dedicated to maintenance activities. The enterprise view considers some aspects of development and installation in addition to operations and maintenance.