Glossary · Systems engineering and MBSE
Lifecycle state
In systems engineering, a lifecycle state is the controlled status of a system or artifact, such as draft, approved, validated, modified, deprecated or retired. It tells users whether an item may be relied on and for what.
- Systems engineering
- Technical documentation
In one sentence
A lifecycle state such as draft, approved, validated or retired tells engineers and readers whether a system or artifact may be relied on.
Example
A validation report for a robot cell moves from “draft” to “approved”; when the cell's safety program changes, the report is set to “modified – under review” until the retest is complete.
How it applies
- State set: Define a small, fixed set of states and the allowed transitions between them, including who may trigger each transition.
- Evidence: Only items in an approved or validated state should support a release decision. A state change after a system change prevents outdated evidence from being reused silently.
- Technical documentation: Documents and topics carry lifecycle states too. In iiRDS, the iiRDS ContentLifeCycleStatus expresses such states in delivered content metadata.
- Change management: “Deprecated” and “retired” are states, not deletions. They support a deprecation path and keep the history retrievable.
Lifecycle state vs. quality status
A lifecycle state describes where an item is in its governed life (draft, approved, retired). A quality status describes the trustworthiness of a value or data point at runtime. They answer different questions.