Engineering Systems : Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World Paperback / softback

by Olivier L. de (Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems, Massachusett Weck, Daniel (Japan Steel Industry Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Roos, Christopher L. (Professor of the Practice, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Magee

Part of the Engineering Systems series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

An overview of engineering systems that describes the new challenges posed for twenty-first-century engineers by today's highly complex sociotechnical systems. Engineering, for much of the twentieth century, was mainly about artifacts and inventions.

Now, it's increasingly about complex systems. As the airplane taxis to the gate, you access the Internet and check email with your PDA, linking the communication and transportation systems.

At home, you recharge your plug-in hybrid vehicle, linking transportation to the electricity grid.

Today's large-scale, highly complex sociotechnical systems converge, interact, and depend on each other in ways engineers of old could barely have imagined.

As scale, scope, and complexity increase, engineers consider technical and social issues together in a highly integrated way as they design flexible, adaptable, robust systems that can be easily modified and reconfigured to satisfy changing requirements and new technological opportunities. Engineering Systems offers a comprehensive examination of such systems and the associated emerging field of study.

Through scholarly discussion, concrete examples, and history, the authors consider the engineer's changing role, new ways to model and analyze these systems, the impacts on engineering education, and the future challenges of meeting human needs through the technologically enabled systems of today and tomorrow.