What is Systems Engineering?

You have all heard about Aerospace, Electrical, Civil, and Mechanical Engineers who specialize in certain area, but what is a system engineer?  A System engineer integrates the disciplines and specialty groups forming a structured approach from concept to production to operation.  It is part management and part technical.   Many different definitions are out on the web and in books on systems engineering.

A Simple Example. 

An aircraft manufacture wants to build a huge jumbo jet, bigger than anything else built before.  They put all their resources into the design and manufacturing but find out that no one will buy it.  Why?  Well they found out that no airport could accommodate that big of an aircraft, the air space system would have to have larger separation due to wake turbulence (less landings), and loading and unloading the passengers would take way too long.  A systems engineer would have looked at the initial design of the aircraft and then all the other systems like the airports, air space, and passenger systems and realized that just building the jumbo jet is not going to make it successful, the infrastructure would have to be redesigned too.

This site organization is pretty well linked throughout between the different pages.