Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World

by Olivier L. de Weck

An overview of engineering systems that describes the new challenges posed for twenty-first-century engineers by today's highly complex sociotechnical systems.

Engineering, for much of the twentieth century, was mainly about artifacts and inventions. Now, it's increasingly about complex systems. As the airplane taxis to the gate, you access the Internet and check email with your PDA, linking the communication and transportation systems. At home, you recharge your plug-in hybrid vehicle, linking transportation to the electricity grid. Today's large-scale, highly complex sociotechnical systems converge, interact, and depend on each other in ways engineers of old could barely have imagined. As scale, scope, and complexity increase, engineers consider technical and social issues together in a highly integrated way as they design flexible, adaptable, robust systems that can be easily modified and reconfigured to satisfy changing requirements and new technological opportunities.

Engineering Systems offers a comprehensive examination of such systems and the associated emerging field of study. Through scholarly discussion, concrete examples, and history, the authors consider the engineer's changing role, new ways to model and analyze these systems, the impacts on engineering education, and the future challenges of meeting human needs through the technologically enabled systems of today and tomorrow.

Genres: Engineering

230 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 21, 2011

Reviews

[Samuel Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the book covered some good ground in terms of explain the meaning of terms such as "Engineering systems" and "Systems engineering" (the difference being that the former represents the problem and the latter the solution), as well as covering the state of the art in terms of education and current examples, it left something to be desired in terms of practical application as well as deeper discussion. The farthest that the book seems to want to delve into they "why" of engineering systems is to simply state that we live in a complex world and can no longer ignore the externalities of the problems we as engineers seek to solve. While this is a true and important point, some of the examples the book chooses are lacking.

To cite a specific example, the book uses the "Big Dig" in Boston as a systems engineering solution to a complex problem. It upholds the expensive solution of "Just put the highway underground" as a panacea just because it involved a long list of stakeholders and took input from many sources. While this may be true, I would consider the Big Dig to be a failure of systems engineering, as it did not properly consider full life-cycle plans for what to do with the reclaimed land. Had the city planners a proper understanding of why the highway was problematic for the city (It created a border between parts of the city that promoted the movement of cars while sacrificing valuable land for urban expansion), they might not have used the reclaimed land to then PUT MORE ROADS ON TOP OF as well as install park spaces that are inherently unattractive spaces for public use because of their being situated between two multi-lane roadways. Parks themselves serve only as bonuses when the areas surrounding them can take advantage of them. Restaurants, schools, residential neighborhoods need to have easy access to these parks for them to serve their multiplying effects on urban use; While they are certainly better than what was there before, they are not nearly as good or useful for the city as what they could be. This to me demonstrates that the author has a significant grasp of what it takes to accomplish systems engineering in theory, but that very specific sociological knowledge must be had to truly capture the nuances of an engineering system. This in turn makes describing and writing about proper application and identification of these concepts difficult to describe for any one engineer (the author).

[Neh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in the last decade. Quite insightful analysis of the past and is prescient, at least indirectly -- the former, about technological leaps, and...for the latter, e.g. how the craze/crave for electicizing automobiles can cause hiccups that we now face)

[Karen Grothe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book which encourages engineers to think about the greater societal consequences of their design beyond just basic utility. The authors make the case that the complexity of systems extends beyond the parts count and obvious interfaces to environmental, societal, and political effects.

[Yushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A basic book for those who have interest in science technology studies. However, it is a good book for engineering experts, systems developers, and engineering designs for expand their knowledge on sociotechnical systems.