Systems engineering

Abstract

The engineering of systems in the 21st century demands robust use of the systems approach given the nature of our times, as well as the systems being created. The global marketplace, changing competition dynamics, shorter life cycles, and increasing complexity characterize our environment. We are building systems that are much larger than ever before. And, we are building systems that are infinitely smaller than ever before. Maturity of technical, management, and infrastructure processes are competitive discriminators. Systems engineering, both as a profession and as practiced by multi-discipline practitioners, is key to addressing these challenges.Over the past decade, there have been frequent debates on whether systems engineering is an approach or a formal field of engineering. Given the technical, management, and environmental challenges of this century, I believe that systems engineering must be an essential engineering discipline for the 21st century. This talk will discuss the state of the art and practice of systems engineering, and several initiatives focused on its evolution as a formal engineering discipline.While systems engineering approaches date back to ancient times, the recent few decades have largely featured practices and methods that extend from efforts of the 1950's, thus drawing heavily from hardware engineering. As software engineering has grown as a discipline, it has had significant influence on the field of systems engineering. Further, as systems engineering becomes a more integral part of commercial product development, the character of the systems engineering discipline expands and the associated research agenda takes new shape. Systems engineering and software engineering must each evolve as unique engineering disciplines to address the engineering problems of the 21st century. We must ensure their evolution results in shared knowledge, and highly collaborative approaches and methods drawing on the unique strengths of each discipline.