Engineering Systems ─ Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World

Engineering, for much of the twentieth century, was mainly about artifacts andinventions. Now, it's increasingly about complex systems. As the airplane taxis to the gate, youaccess the Internet and check email with your PDA, linking the communication and transportationsystems. At home, you recharge your plug-in hybrid vehicle, linking transportation to theelectricity grid. Today's large-scale, highly complex sociotechnical systems converge, interact, anddepend on each other in ways engineers of old could barely have imagined. As scale, scope, andcomplexity increase, engineers consider technical and social issues together in a highly integratedway as they design flexible, adaptable, robust systems that can be easily modified and reconfiguredto satisfy changing requirements and new technological opportunities.Engineering Systems offers acomprehensive examination of such systems and the associated emerging field of study. Throughscholarly discussion, concrete examples, and history, the authors consider the engineer's changingrole, new ways to model and analyze these systems, the impacts on engineering education, and thefuture challenges of meeting human needs through the technologically enabled systems of today andtomorrow.

Olivier L. de Weck is Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems at MIT as well as Associate Director of the Engineering Systems Division. Daniel Roos, Founding Director of Engineering Systems Division, is Japan Steel Industry Professor of Engineering Systems and Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Christopher L. Magee is Professor of the Practice of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems at MIT, where he is also Codirector of the International Design Center of Singapore University of Technology and Design and MIT.