The MIT Engineering Systems Division is an interdisciplinary academic and research unit devoted to addressing large-scale, complex engineering challenges within their socio-political context. MIT defines Engineering Systems as the engineering

Engineering

Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...

 study dealing with diverse, complex, physical design problems that may include components from several engineering disciplines, as well as economics, public policy, and other sciences.

Overview

MIT views "engineering systems" as a distinct approach from the engineering

Engineering

Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...

 science revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Engineering science built on the physical sciences: physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

, mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, chemistry

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

, etc., to build a stronger quantitative base for engineering, as opposed to the empirical base of years past. This approach, while extraordinarily valuable, tends to be very micro in scale, and focuses on mechanics as the underlying discipline. "Engineering systems" takes a step back from the immediacy of the technology and is concerned with how the system in its entirety behaves, for example, emergent behavior of complex systems.

MIT gives two different meanings for the term "engineering systems":

• A collection of engineered systems: Examples include large-scale and complex engineering systems such as: the Internet
  Internet
  The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
  
  , urban planning
  Urban planning
  Urban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....
  
   projects such as Boston
  Boston
  Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
  
  's Big Dig, next generation air traffic control
  Air traffic control
  Air traffic control is a service provided by ground-based controllers who direct aircraft on the ground and in the air. The primary purpose of ATC systems worldwide is to separate aircraft to prevent collisions, to organize and expedite the flow of traffic, and to provide information and other...
  
  , healthcare reform, and network-centric warfare
  Network-centric warfare
  Network-centric warfare, also called network-centric operations, is a military doctrine or theory of war pioneered by the United States Department of Defense in the 1990's....
  
  .
• An approach in engineering based on systems thinking
  Systems thinking
  Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish...
  
  : Hereby engineering systems is different from systems engineering
  Systems engineering
  Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how complex engineering projects should be designed and managed over the life cycle of the project. Issues such as logistics, the coordination of different teams, and automatic control of machinery become more...
  
  . Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. MIT defines engineering systems as a multidisciplinary approach that does the same thing but has a management, policy, or social dimension as well as a technical one.

Engineering Systems: Topics

Engineering Systems are:

• Technologically enabled: Networks & Meta-systems which transform, transport, exchange and regulate Mass, Energy and Information.
• Large-scale: large number of interconnections and components.
• Socio-technical aspects: social, political and economic aspects that influence them.
• Nested complexity: within technical system and social/political system.
• Dynamic: involving multiple time scales, uncertainty & lifecycle issues.
• Likely to have emergent properties.

External links

• MIT's Engineering Systems site
• Engineering Systems at MIT, 2007.