|
by
Lois Slavin, ESD Communications
Director
On
March 29-31, 2004, the Engineering Systems Symposium brought
over 360 leading academics, industry and government representatives,
and students to MIT to learn from each other about the
emerging field of Engineering Systems and to consider
ways to work together. The Symposium, a “call to
arms” organized by MIT’s Engineering Systems
Division, was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,
the Cambridge-MIT Institute, the MIT Industrial Liaison
Program, and MIT School of Engineering.
“This
Symposium is a remarkable, perhaps historic, event of
great import to engineering education and to our Institution,”
remarked MIT President Charles M. Vest in the opening
session. “If we are to continue to be a great Engineering
school in the future and help address complex problems
like anti-terrorism, the Columbia Shuttle tragedy, globalization
and sustainability in ways that benefit humankind, we
will need to be great in Engineering Systems.”
Vest
thanked Associate Dean of Engineering Systems Daniel Roos,
for his intellectual perseverance in cultivating “the
emergence of this embryonic field” and helping establish
MIT’s Engineering Systems Division in 1998. He added
that Roos and fellow ESD Co-Director Professor Daniel
Hastings make a very effective team. He also praised Institute
Professor Joel Moses, who co-chaired the Symposium Committee
with Professor Thomas Allen, for his “tremendous
vision of the intellectual excitement and real-world importance
of the field.”
The
Symposium began with an overview of the evolution of engineering
by MIT Visiting Professor Thomas Hughes, MIT Professor
David Mindell and Roos.
Hughes
shared observations and examples of the “elegant
simplicity” of early engineering and the “messy
complexity” of modern large scale systems, while
Mindell discussed the development of Engineering Science
as a discipline by Vannevar Bush and others at MIT. Mindell
then showed how various aspects of Engineering Systems
in business (operations research), politics (oil; the
Vietnam war) and other arenas (the Apollo program; the
Columbia tragedy) led to the realization that a broader,
systems approach was needed, one that embraced the broad,
complex socio-political context in which technological
innovations were occurring.
Roos,
co- author of the ground-breaking best-seller, The
Machine that Changed the World, described several
characteristics of the emerging field of Engineering Systems,
noting “Today’s engineers need to understand
the multi-dimensional complexity of the context in which
technological innovations occur,” he explained.
“Often this leads to unanticipated emergent properties.
Engineers must learn to anticipate them and to deal with
the long term implications.”
Roos
then went on to outline the formation of MIT’s ESD
in December 1998 and its dual objectives; To create a
new field of study, and tio broaden Engineering education
and practice.
The
remainder of the Symposium consisted of panels and presentations
by industry, government and academic leaders who gave examples
of engineering systems in their arenas, stressing the imperative
for a collaborative interdisciplinary approach among all
three sectors. Speakers included:
-
MIT School of Engineering Dean Thomas Magnanti, who
emphasized that developing leaders must be a key part
of Engineering Systems because “complex systems
are a complex business.”
-
Institute Professor Sheila Widnall, a member of the
Columbia Accident Investigation Board, who described
the technical cause of the shuttle disaster and the
long-standing organizational and managerial context
which allowed the tragedy to occur.
-
Professor Fred Salvucci, who shared lessons learned
from the political and economic issues and their interplay
with the engineering challenges of the Big Dig and the
Boston Harbor Cleanup
-
William Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering
, who called for an inclusion of macro-ethics in Engineering
Systems, so that engineers consider not only their own
individual actions, but also the resultant interactions
with society, sustainability, and policy.
-
Dr.
Joseph Bordogna, Deputy Director of the National Science
Foundation, who emphasized the importance of including
people in the Engineering Systems picture
-
A
range of Engineering leaders from MIT, Cambridge University,
UK, Carnegie Mellon, Delft University of Technology,
George Mason University, Georgia Tech, Stanford, University
of Arkansas, University of Michigan, University of Virginia,
University of Southern California and others who shared
information on their academic programs and thoughts
on moving forward collaboratively to define the emerging
field of Engineering Systems
-
Thought-leaders and industry experts, among them best-selling
authors and consultants James Champy and Michael Hammer;
Chief Scientist of the Singapore Ministry of Defense
PC Lui; inventor and former executive director of AT&T
Bell Laboratories’ Communications Sciences Research
Division Robert Lucky
-
ESD Co-Director Daniel Hastings, who called for focus
on developing a new generation of engineering leaders
through an emphasis on Engineering Systems.
-
Travis Engen President of Alcan, who emphasized the
importance of corporations considering sustainability
in developing and implementing projects that effect
society.
A
key feature of the Symposium was the release of the Engineering
Systems Monograph by ESD faculty and staff . In addition
to the paper by Roos on the history leading to ESD’s
creation of ED and a paper by Hastings on the future of
ESD, there are six papers in the Monograph on the foundations
of Engineering Systems. A framing paper on foundational
issues by Joel Moses is followed by five papers on various
aspects of the field. Dan Whitney was principal author
of a paper on systems architecture, Richard de Neufville
played a similar role in a paper on uncertainty, Tom Allen
wrote on enterprise systems, David Marks on sustainability
and Nancy Leveson on systems safety. The Monograph papers
can be found at http://esd.mit.edu/symposium/monograph/
The
remaining papers presented at the Symposium can be viewed
at http://esd.mit.edu/symposium/agenda_day3.htm.
At
the Symposium, Roos announced that over 20 of the top Engineering
schools in the US and Europe have agreed to work collaboratively
to define and evolve the field of Engineering Systems by
sharing educational materials and information on job opportunities
for Ph.D.s in Engineering Systems, and holding inter-university
student colloquia.
|