Coventry, United Kingdom

Systems Engineering

Integrated Master's degree
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: engineering and engineering trades
Qualification: MEng
Kind of studies: full-time studies
Master of Engineering (MEng)
University website: www.warwick.ac.uk
Engineering
Engineering is the creative application of science, mathematical methods, and empirical evidence to the innovation, design, construction, operation and maintenance of structures, machines, materials, devices, systems, processes, and organizations. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of applied mathematics, applied science, and types of application. See glossary of engineering.
Systems Engineering
Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design and manage complex systems over their life cycles. At its core, systems engineering utilizes systems thinking principles to organize this body of knowledge. Issues such as requirements engineering, reliability, logistics, coordination of different teams, testing and evaluation, maintainability and many other disciplines necessary for successful system development, design, implementation, and ultimate decommission become more difficult when dealing with large or complex projects. Systems engineering deals with work-processes, optimization methods, and risk management tools in such projects. It overlaps technical and human-centered disciplines such as industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, manufacturing engineering, control engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, cybernetics, organizational studies and project management. Systems engineering ensures that all likely aspects of a project or system are considered, and integrated into a whole.
Systems Engineering
Among the first texts to use the term [Systems engineering] was Louis Ridenour’s Radar System Engineering, published in 1947 as part of the Radiation Laboratory’s series of textbooks. The title refers to the physiological sense of system, that is “how to engineer a radar system,” – where an individual radar is a connected set of components like magnetrons, waveguides, power supplies, and display tubes. Title does not refer to the philosophical sense of system, as in “how to system engineer a radar,” but such ideas are nascent in the book: it covers not only wave propagation and noise models, but also the appropriate design of displays and the dissemination of information through a radar organization. Ridenour’s text includes no discussion of feedback or servomechanisms, or of the dynamic characteristics of radar systems. A McGraw Hill text, System Engineering [by Harry H. Goode, and Robert E. Machol, published ten years later, included probability, analog and digital computers for simulation, queuing theory, game theory, information theory, servomechanism theory, and sections on “human engineering,” management, and economics.
David A. Mindell (2002) "Bodies, Ideas, and Dynamics: Historical Perspectives on Systems Thinking in Engineering". ESD Symposium, May 2002
Engineering
Only among those who were engaged in a particular activity did their language remain unchanged; so, for in­stance, there was one for all the architects, one for all the carriers of stones, one for all the stone-breakers, and so on for all the different opera­tions. As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke. But the holy tongue remained to those who had neither joined in the project nor praised it, but instead, thoroughly disdaining it, had made fun of the builders' stupidity.
Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, Chapter VII
Engineering
Engineering is the conscious application of science to the problem of economic production.
Halbert Powers Gillette (1910). cited in: T.J. Hoover & J.C. Lounsbury Fish. The Engineering Profession. Stanford University Press, 1941. p. 463
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