Function Model - History

History

The model originates in the 1950s, after in the first half of the 20th century other types of management diagrams had already been developed. The first known Gantt Chart was developed in 1896 by Karol Adamiecki, who called it a harmonogram. Because Adamiecki did not publish his chart until 1931 - and in any case his works were published in either Polish or Russian, languages not popular in the West - the chart now bears the name of Henry Gantt (1861–1919), who designed his chart around the years 1910-1915 and popularized it in the West. The first structured method for documenting process flow, the flow process chart, was introduced by Frank Gilbreth to members of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 1921 as the presentation “Process Charts—First Steps in Finding the One Best Way”. Gilbreth's tools quickly found their way into industrial engineering curricula.

One of the first well defined function models, was the Functional Flow Block Diagram (FFBD) developed by the defense-related TRW Incorporated in the 1950s. In the 1960s it was exploited by the NASA to visualize the time sequence of events in a space systems and flight missions. It is further widely used in classical systems engineering to show the order of execution of system functions.