Systems Engineering Science

This chapter addresses the scientific foundation of systems engineering (SE) and how it can and should support the practice of SE. Changes occurring in the nature and scope of SE are driving an expansion in scope of the science that underpins SE practice. Because of that relationship, the chapter describes the changes in SE and in science-based engineering (SBE), and then describes the SE Science (SES) resulting from the changes in nature and scope of SE. Changes in SE are presented as a contrast between classic SE and this new, emerging SE. The expansion that SE is experiencing – beyond its traditional application domains such as defense, transportation, and energy into even more complex domains such as healthcare, law, social systems, and national policy making – is discussed, along with the increasing prominence of autonomous and intelligent machine agents and other elements of change. This expansion also necessitates a corresponding expansion in supporting science, from the traditional mechanical and physical sciences into life and social sciences, as well as making clearer the need for systems and computational sciences. It is fortunate that the sciences needed for this broader scope do not have to be invented; they already exist, and just need to be more explicitly applied, leveraged, and adapted to SE. Part of the leverage discussion is how the expanded SES can be made more accessible (and translatable) to practitioners of the expanded SE discipline. The changes exhibited in emerging SE and SBE, and the agent orientation in which they are presented in the chapter are captured in a generalized agent model that is a unifying framework formalized in an appendix to the chapter.