Engineering system
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A defining characteristic of an engineering system is the presence of a social, policy, or managerial dimensions in a technical system.
Examples include large scale and complex engineering systems such as: the Internet, urban planning projects such as Boston's Big Dig, next generation air traffic control, healthcare reform, and netcentric warfare.
"Engineering systems" is different from "systems engineering." Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. Engineering systems is often defined as a multidisciplinary approach that does the same thing. Unlike systems engineering, an engineering system has a management, policy, or social dimension as well as a technical one.
Engineering systems is viewed as a distinct approach from the engineering science revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Engineering science built on the physical sciences: physics, mathematics, chemistry, 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.
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
