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MIT Engineering Systems

The MIT Engineering Systems Division is an interdisciplinary academic and research unit focused on addressing complex engineering challenges within their social context. Engineering systems considers technical, economic, policy and social factors and takes a holistic view of large-scale systems rather than focusing only on technical details. Topics of interest include networked systems that regulate information, energy and materials across many interconnected components.

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MIT Engineering Systems

The MIT Engineering Systems Division is an interdisciplinary academic and research unit focused on addressing complex engineering challenges within their social context. Engineering systems considers technical, economic, policy and social factors and takes a holistic view of large-scale systems rather than focusing only on technical details. Topics of interest include networked systems that regulate information, energy and materials across many interconnected components.

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MIT Engineering Systems Division

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 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.[1]

Contents

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5

Overview
Engineering Systems: Topics
See also
References
External links

Overview
MIT views "engineering systems" 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.
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, urban planning projects such as Boston's Big Dig, next
generation air traffic control, healthcare reform, and network-centric warfare.
An approach in engineering based on systems thinking: Hereby engineering systems is
different from systems engineering. 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.

See also

Complex systems
System Design and Management (MIT)

References

1. Engineering Systems FAQs (http://esd.mit.edu/about/faqs.html) at MIT, 2014.

External links

MIT's Engineering Systems site (http://esd.mit.edu)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?


title=MIT_Engineering_Systems_Division&oldid=691501378"

Categories: Engineering education in the United States Massachusetts Institute of Technology


Systems engineering Systems science education Technology systems
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