Homestead Project

We have just about enough in the Objectives & Requirements Document for our Peak Oil Homestead Project to proceed with designing some suitable homestead concepts. Please keep in mind that you would likely want a few more requirements before proceeding with a design, but in the interest of time (and to keep everyone from losing interest) we’ll proceed with what we have.

This is a good time to note that one of the reasons it has taken so long to develop the methodology we’re using for the Homestead Project is that I’m working to adapt techniques to our small homestead more commonly used for large-scale industrial projects like the Space Shuttle. The underlying drivers are the same, but much of the available material has a much grander focus.

Now that we have plowed the road for applying Systems Engineering to designing for Peak Oil, further projects will flow much more smoothly. In the future we will design entire communities, constitutions, specific functional buildings (e.g. community medical facilities), and much more within a much shorter time span. So, hopefully you all have not lost patience with this process yet and are interested to see how all this designing plays out!

We’ll round things out with the following energy and water system requirements:

While not necessarily conclusive, this list of requirements should round out the bulk of overall top-level for the Peak Oil Homestead Project. From here we can move on to designing specific elements of the homestead and begin the process of developing trade studies. We’ll get there yet!

I updated the project page to include the relevant blog posts for each update. This should make the entire project a bit easier to follow and give people an easier time of tracing its development.

As always, feel free to post any questions about the project in general in the Community Design Forum.

Shelter -- one of the most basic human needs -- can be a very complex thing to construct. For the next installment of requirements development for the Peak Oil Homestead Project, we’ll explore how we should specify our housing needs to account for Peak Oil.

Many of the weather input requirements defined in Section 1.1.1 of the Objectives & Requirements Document (doc) have “child” requirements in the various subsystems. For the Structural Subsystem we have:

In earlier posts (Subsystem Design: Garden Requirements and Defining the Garden) we started exploring specific requirements for gardening and food production. Here are some more formal requirements for the that are now incorporated into the Objectives & Requirements Document (doc).

Input requirements:

The FPS shall use organic fertilizer for crop production as specified in the Organic Farming Specification.
The FPS shall use organic mulch for crop production as specified in the Organic Farming Specification.
The FPS shall treat plant and animal disease using non-toxic methods.
The Organic Farming Specification will be defined later.

Non-functional requirements make up the bulk of any Objectives and Requirements Document such as in the Peak Oil Homestead Example. They specify the qualities of the system that will provide the functions we desire. Below are some further non-functional requirements for the Homestead.

Maintenance is the most time consuming activity at a homestead, but it could also become one of the most enjoyable. Feeding the animals, tending the garden, or patching a hole doesn’t have to be a burden, but only if you plan ahead.

Some requirements that may help ensure happy maintenance for the life of our example Peak Oil Homestead are discussed below.

We have perhaps a dozen requirements scattered through the discussions in this blog that we have not yet incorporated into the Peak Oil Homestead Project. With the benefit of detailed requirements structure, it’s now an almost enjoyable task to plug them into the project.

In Global Warming meets Peak Oil Design, I introduced several potential requirements. Before I show you where to stash ‘em, I want to make some improvements.

The Peak Oil Homestead Requirements are now organized according to the structure discussed last week. The major subsystems of the homestead are given separate sections within the main Objectives and Requirements Document (ORD). Once the main requirements are fully developed and design solutions are chosen, further ORD’s will describe components of the major subsystems (e.g. cistern requirements).

This looks like a good time to introduce a more robust requirements management method for the Peak Oil Homestead Project. The original Objectives & Requirements Document attempted to align every requirement with specific objectives. This helped reinforce the idea that no requirement can be created in a vacuum – it must be backed up by goals and objectives.

Now that you understand the basics behind Systems Engineering, however, we need to select a more versatile organizational scheme to move the project forward. You may have noticed that as the project developed some requirements were left in the cold with no particular objective to call home. These included things like our maintainability and reliability requirements.

Continuing with the discussion of weather effects from a couple posts ago, there are many other requirements we can define.

Jeff pointed out that we need to more carefully examine how much rain falls during the growing season, rather than just the whole year’s average. I’m looking for the data on that for our selected Iowa location and I’ll get back to you.

In the following draft requirements, the term “withstand” may need some further definition. The understanding of what withstanding something may vary from person to person – some might consider it to mean every part of the structure and farm stays intact, and some might imagine it means only the core structure must survive. Any thoughts on a better way to define this term?