Building the tower without climbing it: Progress in engineering systems

Abstract

The Engineering Systems (ES) movement set a research agenda that transformed the field of systems engineering. By focusing on complex sociotechnical systems, the ES movement dramatically expanded the scope of the problems that could be addressed by systems engineers, drawing young scholars into the field. ES succeeded in focusing the scholarly community around the concepts of the "ilities"-nontraditional system lifecycle properties-sociotechnical complexity, and system architecture. In this article, I review some of the progress made by scholars in the field, outline directions for future work, and identify challenges facing future progress in systems engineering. Specific attention is given to approaches that emphasize the roles of abstraction hierarchies, contextual interpretation, knowledge sharing, and expertise. I also briefly address the perceived trade-off between academic rigor and practical utility-a perennial concern in the field. In each case, a review of the literature is performed documenting the progress made by the ES community and other scholarly communities whose findings may be synergistic with ours. Finally, I conclude with a proposal for preserving the momentum started by the ES movement by suggesting a forum for diverse scholarly discourse in systems engineering. K E Y W O R D Sarchitecture, language, model-based systems engineering, rigor, Tower of Babel Genesis 11:1-9, trans. Hebrew, JPS, 1985. 1

Assaying the importance of system complexity for the systems engineering community

“…A significant challenge for those wishing to evaluate system complexity, and one that persists despite considerable research effort, is finding a single, agreed definition of the term “system complexity” itself 3,6,14,15 . Even determining a distinction between a complex system and a complicated system is not unanimously agreed by the community, where some argue the distinction is between how ordered a system is and therefore how predictable a system is due to the presence (or absence) of nonlinearities and changes within the system, which give rise to emergent behavior 16–18 , others emphasize the distinction in terms of how difficult a system is to understand or successfully realize, stressing that complexity is observer dependent 19…”

Trends in Occurrences of Systems Engineering Topics in Literature

“…In another study, Broniatowski reviewed the progress made in the field of SE by focusing on important topics such as the "ilities", system architecture, political and social values, the need for rigor, and diversity [41]. He later performed a bibliographic analysis on abstracts from the "Web of Science" database for the years 1990-2017 using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method.…”

“…Only certain topics analyzed by Broniatowski overlap with the topics selected by the authors of this paper. Furthermore, the dataset used in [41] is only abstracts, whereas this paper includes the complete texts of the analyzed articles. In addition, the analysis in this paper uses different methods.…”

Communicating Meaning in the Intelligence Enterprise

“…Furthermore, frequent feedback from both experts and decision makers can help verify whether the associated gists are both accurate and responsive. Finally, organizational structure may also play an important role in effective gist communication (Broniatowski, 2018; Broniatowski & Moses, 2016).…”