Premier Systems Engineering Workshop

Program Highlights

FuSE Stream

FuSE Plenary and Keynote

The Co-theme of IW 2023 is the Future of Systems Engineering Initiative to realize the SE Vision 2035. The four streams will be introduced: Vision & Roadmaps, Foundations, Methodologies, and Application Extensions. Dr. Oli de Weck (MIT) will keynote on the foundations of systems engineering both from the scientific literature and industrial practice. The FuSE sessions at the IW will be outlined.

Systems Engineering Vision and Roadmaps Stream

The Systems Engineering Vision and Roadmaps stream continuously refines, evolves, and complements the SE Vision 2035. Furthermore, we create an integrated set of roadmaps across the four interrelated FuSE streams. The concurrently executed streams will guide and influence each other. The IW 2023 goal is to frame the structural relationships and value models for the roadmaps’ creation.

Systems Engineering Foundations Stream

In order to yield predictable results Systems Engineering methods and tools need to be built on foundational principles that are provably true, and based on laws and axioms that can be tested for falsifiability similar to those in other well-established disciplines of science and engineering like Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering or Biological Engineering. These streams will formulate a set of candidates underlying Laws of Systemics, the science at the foundation of Systems Engineering. Since Systems Engineering is primarily a cognitive science where teams of humans (using their brains) and computers (using algorithms) create and process informational artifacts such as requirements, functional decompositions, structural representations, models and simulations, and eventually digital twins, we hypothesize that the foundations of Systems Engineering are closely related to Information Theory, Complexity Science and Social Science. In this workstream we will first focus on finding agreement on the first law, tentatively formulated as "Conservation of System Complexity", which parallels the Conservation of Energy in Thermodynamics (1st Law) and the Conservation of Mass in continuum mechanics.

Participants in this workstream will come from academia, industry and government agencies.

Systems Engineering Methodology Stream

The SE Methodology stream guides the advancement of practices, methods, and tools for the effective engineering of systems to be fit for purpose in the presence of varying scale, interrelatedness, complexity, non-determinism, and emerging technology innovations such as AI and agility. The IW 2023 goal is to assess the adequacy of current INCOSE technical products and ongoing FuSE projects in this stream and identify gaps.

Systems Engineering Application Extensions Stream

The SE Application Extensions stream integrates social sciences, soft systems, as well as initiatives such as Smart Cities to address grand challenges to meet human and societal needs as stated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The IW 2023 goal is to frame the value model to justify systems engineering’s role at the policy table for these grand challenges.