UK Chapter

Engineering evolved during the second half of the second millennium as a process for harnessing technology to produce products to support human-centric activity. As engineering became more specialised society’s expectations of engineering it increased. These fostered the need for an overarching process to co-ordinate and integrate engineering and related activities. From these beginnings, systems engineering has emerged in the last 60 years.

Systems engineering is the interface between engineering and its customers: commerce and society. It has proved so useful and successful that it has been adopted by non-engineering, more human-oriented disciplines. In order to meet the challenges of these new applications, systems engineering has broadened its tool set to embrace “soft” methods, many of which were originally developed in the human sciences. Thus systems engineering has evolved to provide an integrating conceptual framework for understanding stakeholder (including customer and user) needs; for exploring the solution space to determine the preferred solution; and for co-ordinating all the specialist activities that are needed to realise the selected solution.

The discipline of systems engineering now straddles the traditional boundary between the Sciences and Humanities. It has become subject to complex, sometimes contradictory influences. During the 2001 Spring Symposium we would like to explore both the achievements of systems engineering and the challenges facing it. What is the current state of systems engineering? How will it develop in the future? What are the driving forces behind the development of systems engineering? What new skills do systems engineers need to acquire? What new process concepts need to be developed to formalise the application of SE beyond the traditional ‘hard’ systems boundaries? What emerging technologies can be exploited to enhance systems engineering tool capabilities?

Since the terrible events of 11 Sep 01, the world has faced a much more uncertain future. Routine travel throughout the world by air, which has hitherto been taken for granted, has become a major source of concern. This has not only caused a major re-assessment of the security and safety of air travel, but the certainties surrounding many other aspects of our ever-more interconnected life have been called into question. A number of recent public inquiries into major incidents have referred to a failure of systems as a prime contributory factor.

In getting to the root of these kinds of issues we need to take into account all dimensions of the problem – people, both operators and customers, technology, organisation, environment etc – in other words, the kind of holistic approach that Systems Engineering is well placed to provide. The Spring Symposium for 2002 will therefore have as its theme “Triple SE” – Safe and Secure Systems Engineering.