The aim of this paper is to propose a rigorous and complete design framework for complex system based on system engineering (SE) principles. The SE standard EIA-632 is used to guide the approach. Within this framework, two aspects are presented. The first one concerns the integration of safety requirements and management in system engineering process. The objective is to help designers and engineers in managing safety of complex systems. The second aspect concerns model driven design through the definition of an information model. This model is based on SysML (System Modeling Language) to address requirements definition and their traceability towards the solution and the Verification and Validation (V&V) elements.